Today's Stories

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Going Dry in Sacramento

Will There be Water Riots?

By SETH SANDRONSKY

A suburb of 109,000 people in Placer County, 16 northeast of Sacramento on Interstate 80, the city of Roseville’s demand for water from the American River via Folsom Lake outstrips the supply. Why? Blame last year’s drought plus a rain- and snow-free March and April.

“We had hoped for a full rainfall this winter,” said Lisa Amaral, water conservation manager for the city of Roseville. “Then snowfall, 121 percent of normal this January, evaporated into the ground from the early and warm weather.”
   
In mid-Feb., the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation sent letters to cities from Bakersfield to Redding, its water customers in the federal Central Valley Project. The CVP was begun in 1935 partly to move water from the northern Central Valley to its southern part to help agribusiness.

The BoR letter to Roseville said to brace for an annual cut of 25 percent in the city’s 2008 water supply from Folsom Lake, based on its annual forecast of historical rain fall and snowpack data from California’s Dept. of Water Resources, said BoR spokesman Jeff McCracken.

Roseville’s 2008’s deficit amounts to 1,200 acre feet of water. That is equal to the amount of water which 1,600 residential households use in one year. (An acre foot of water is one acre of land covered with one foot of water, or 325,851 gallons.)

Roseville, which gets 400 acre feet of water from groundwater, also buys 10,000 acre feet of water annually from the Placer County Water District, a county-wide agency. Its contract with Roseville has options to sell it 20,000 acre feet of water from the Hell Hole and French Meadow reservoirs on the middle fork of the American River, said Brain Martin, director of technical services for the PCWD. 

Still on April 29, Roseville announced that it was launching voluntary water reduction measures this year, officially a “Stage One conservation alert.”

“We are asking our residents and businesses to do their part and make changes in their water use to achieve a 10 percent reduction in 2008,” said Derrick Whitehead, director of Roseville’s Environmental Utilities, the public water entity. 

To this end, the city is educating residents to irrigate their lawns less, take shorter showers, and employ low-flow water devices. Roseville is also hiring two temporary employees to expand the city’s outreach program. The new hires, hired from May to September, are working with the existing staff to contact water users on various voluntary measures.

To this end, enforcement is also a part of the city’s campaign. Meet Roseville’s “water waste patrols.” They focus on residents’ use of water under the city’s municipal code and current conservation policy. This bans hosing down buildings, driveways, parking lots and sidewalks unless it’s required for public health. Restaurant workers are to serve customers water only when they request it.      

Roseville’s water conservation plan has four additional and mandatory steps if volunteerism does not solve the current supply and demand problem. Stages two though five would mandate reducing water by increments of 10 percent each.

Roseville is the first community in the Sacramento region to pursue a policy of voluntary water conservation. The city’s residential customers, 89 percent of consumers, use half the water supply, Amaral said. The city’s nonresidential water users are 11 percent and consume the other 50 percent of the resource.

Roseville operates under California’s Urban Water Management Planning Act of 1983. The Act, amended many times over 25 years, states that  “every urban water supplier should make every effort to ensure the appropriate level of reliability in its water service sufficient to meet the needs of its various categories of customers during normal, dry, and multiple dry water years.”   

In addition to this law, there is the factor of consumer motivation. 

“Volunteer water reduction has had mixed success when folks are convinced to be more careful with water,” said Ron Stork, senior policy advocate for the Friends of the River, which calls itself “California’s statewide river conservation organization.”

On that note, there are limits to how much individual water consumers can do, according to Joe Medeiros, a professor of environmental science at Sierra College.

“It cracks me up when municipalities ask users to cut back on their water usage,” he said.  “That’s only makes sense if agriculture, which uses 80 percent of the developed water in California, does its fair share, too. Otherwise, agriculture sounds like a sacred cow.”

And a cash cow? Over-all agricultural activity accounted for $57.7 billion of California’s $1.5 trillion economy in 2005 versus $53.6 billion of $1.4 trillion in 2004, the California Dept. of Finance's said. Two of the Central Valley’s top water-intensive crops were alfalfa and cotton in 2006, according to the California Dept. of Food and Agriculture.

Meanwhile, gas prices are rising, home prices are falling and the job market is weakening. As these squeezes tighten down on its residential and nonresidential customers, Roseville is using cash incentives such as rebates. One example of this is a rebate for consumers to buy home appliances that use less water.

Speaking of prices and resources, Roseville began requiring water meters for new residential construction in 1992. In mid-2001 the city established a goal of 15,000 water meters and has installed 9,000 to-date, said Sean Bigley, administrative analyst for the city.   

Downstream from Roseville is the city of Sacramento. Its charter prohibits residential water meters. That’s a factor in the misuse of water by residents of the city, which has legal rights to water from the American River, Stork said.

Back in Roseville, however, its meters are not a cure-all for its residents’ use of water. Apparently, what the economists call the price signal has limits with respect to water use.

At the same time there is the matter of water-use governance. Roseville has an elected city council with a public utilities commission that takes input from residents. Citizens and policymakers live in the same community. Profits are not the sole factor in policy-making.  

In contrast, there are privately-owned water companies such as the Fruitridge Vista and Golden State Water companies in Sacramento County. The state Public Utilities Commission, based in San Francisco, regulates these firms, not local customers who vote. This fact makes PUC water governance quite different from that of a public utility such as Roseville, said Stork.

“It’s hard to imagine a more public resource than water,” said Dave Evans, chair of the geology department at CSU Sacramento.

On May 1 the state Dept. of Water Resources released its last snow survey of 2008. The data showed 67 percent of snow water content of normal for the date, throughout the state. This data might change California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s call in Feb. to cut per person water use 20 percent by 2020. 

Against this backdrop, Roseville residents received letters in late May detailing the city’s voluntary water conservation measures. It is unclear how they will work there and in turn shape future water-use policy for the Sacramento region and California. Much is at stake. 

Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento ssandronsky@yahoo.com.

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