Today's Stories

May 29-31, 2009

Vijay Prashad
Reeling Republicans

May 28, 2009

Joan Roelofs
The Philanthropies and the Economic Crisis

Paul Craig Roberts
Torture and the American Conscience

Ralph Nader
Corporate Frankensteins

Mouin Rabbani
The Dangers of False Optimism in the Middle East

Joe Bageant
Plain Truths From Appalachia: a Redneck View of Obamarama

James McEnteer
America Held Hostage

Dedrick Muhammad
Obama and the Harsh Racial Reality

Richard Morse
On Speaking Out in Haiti

David Macaray
Have We Turned Into Sheep?

Harvey Wasserman
The 8 Green Steps to Solartopia

Website of the Day
Col. Peters: Just Kill the Gitmo Detainees

May 27, 2009

Joanne Mariner
Military Commissions, Round Three

Paul Craig Roberts
Doublespeak on North Korea

Walden Bello
Can China Save the World From Depression?

Dave Lindorff
Recidivism and Guantánamo

Brian M. Downing
Along the Durand Line

Carlos Villarreal
Separate But Equal Just Fine in California?

Nadia Hijab
Israel's Next Move: Armageddon Now?

Adam Federman
The PCBs of the Hudson River

Laray Polk
RadWaste and Texas' Future

Isabella Kenfield
The Fall of a Brazilian Financier

David Michael Green
Overcoming the Poverty of Ambition

Website of the Day
The Case Against Shell

May 26, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Fearful Pride: North Korea's Second Nuclear Test

Mike Whitney
The Next Leg Down: When Deflation Becomes Entrenched

Sharon Smith
Obama and Abortion Rights: What We Learned at Notre Dame

Marjorie Cohn
The Gitmo Appeasment Plan: Obama Buckles on the Constitution

Dean Baker
Waterboard the Fed

Deepankar Basu
Was the Indian Election a Debacle for the Left? If So, Why?

Fred Gardner
The Vindication of Sgt. Northcutt

Jordan Flaherty
New Orleans for Sale

Josh Ruebner
Rethinking the Costs of Peace

Brian Cloughley
The Man Who Murdered Count Foulke Bernadotte

Website of the Day
The Montana Town That Wants to Become the New Gitmo

May 25, 2009

Diane Christian
Looking at Torture

John Ross
Mexico's Shock Doctrine

Kenneth Hartman
The Trouble With Prison

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu Goes to Washington

Fred Gardner
"War on Pot" Overrides "Support Our Troops": the Punishment of Sgt. Northcutt

Cindy Sheehan
Day of the Dead

Sen. Russell Feingold
Prolonged Detention and the Rule of Law: a Letter to Barack Obama

Sibel Edmonds
Two Sides of the Same Coin: From State Secrets to War to Wiretaps

Franklin Lamb
Der Spiegel Tries Again

Dave Lindorff
Memorial Day in the Land of the Weak and Wussy

Daniel Wolff
Learning to Read in the Pacific Northwest

Website of the Day
Decoration Day

May 22-24, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
How Long Does It Take?

Michael Teitelman
Obama, Torture and John Walker Lindh

Mike Whitney
Credit Default Swaps: the Poison in the System

Ray McGovern
Cheney Breaks the Taboo: Support for Israel Feeds Terrorism

Sonia Cardenas /
Andrew Flibbert
Why We Love to Hate Pirates

Clive Hamilton
Biblical Prophesy and the Iraq War: Bush, God, Iraq and Gog

Conn Hallinan
Swine Flu Fallout

Fred Gardner
Sgt. Northcutt's Homecoming

Carlo Cristofori
The Latest AfPak War

Dean Baker
A Friendly Financial Intervention

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah's 57-State Solution

Andy Worthington
A Message to Obama: No Military Commissions; No Preventive Detentions

David Macaray
Democrats Betray Labor: Card Check is Pronouced Dead

Nadia Hijab
What Kind of State?

Franklin Lamb
How Not to Win Votes for Team USA

Ted Newcomen
The Forgotten Casualties

David Ker Thomson
Joy (Or How Hope, the Thing With Feathers, Gets Plucked)

David Rosen
Porn Wars

Mark Weisbrot
Climate Change and Intellectual Property Rights?

Robert Fantina
Gitmo, Democrats and Business as Usual

Heather Gray
Some Positive Directions in Public Health?

Farzana Versey
The Myth of Manmohan Singh

Chris Genovali
A Paler Shade of Green

Ron Jacobs
His Terrible Swift Sword: the Legacy of John Brown

Jay Diamond
Why the Left Should Cheer Hannity and Limbaugh

Dr. Susan Block
The Binds That Bond

Ben Sonnenberg
"Ballast": An Endlessness of Almost Ending

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost ... Again

Lorenzo Wolff
My Problem with Led Zeppelin

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Bohm

Website of the Weekend
Bob Graham's CIA Notebooks

May 21, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
The Politics of Bait-and-Switch: Obama and the Environment

Paul Craig Roberts
Morphing Dick Cheney

Chris Floyd
In Defense of George W. Bush

Gerald Paoli
Inside Iraqi Kurdistan: Life and Death in the Qandil Mountains

Zach Mason
Something's Gotta Give: Obama and the Hustler

Uri Avnery
A Quarrel on the Titanic

Andy Worthington
Out of Guantánamo

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
India: Two Funerals and a Wedding

Norman Solomon
The Afghanistan Escalation

Dave Lindorff
A Corporate Crime Wave of Labor Law Violations

Website of the Day
Swine Flu: The Panic That Wasn't

May 20, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Toll Booth Economy

Gary Leupp
Courting Hekmatyar: Obama and the Warlord

Michael D. Yates
Work is Hell

Jonathan Cook
Netanyahu Adviser Steps Out of the Shadows

Peter Lee
The World Doesn't Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem ... It Has a David Albright Problem

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Tamil Tigers?

Peter Zinn
Eulogizing Lawyers

William Loren Katz
Tortured Reasoning; Tortured Results

Gary Lapon
Why Women Need Single Payer

Trudy Bond
Torture, Shrinks and a Groundhog's Day Moment

Website of the Day
Meet the Climate Change Lobby

May 19, 2009

Kristoffer Rehder
Check Point Iraq: a Soldier's Tale

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of the Financial Crisis

Ray McGovern
How Colin Powell Got Duped by the CIA

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Elections: a Game Changer?

Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam
Intimidation and Interrogation in Tel Aviv

Mustafa Barghouthi
Is Obama Up to the Challenge of Dealing with Netanyahu?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo: A Prison Built on Lies

Binoy Kampmark
Britain's Speaker Crisis

John Walsh
John Kerry vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Alcohol as Metaphor: Zero Tolerance in the Workplace

Website of the Day
So You Think That Veggie Burger is Organic...

May 18, 2009

Dave Lindorff
The US is Using White Phosporous in Afghanistan

Abdul Malik Mujahid
Thirty Years of Tragedy in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
How Many Secret Prisons Does Israel Have?

Ben Rosenfeld
Police Violence: How Many Kicks to the Head Does It Take?

Patrick Cockburn
These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban

Ralph Nader
They Want It All: New Tricks From the Old Energy Lobby

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Bryce Lefever Clarifies Defense of Torture

Eugenia Tsao
On the Devaluation of Labor

Walter Brasch
Cheney's Magical Mystery Media Tour

Roberto Rodriguez
War and Torture

Charlotte Laws
Politics and American Idol

Website of the Day
Disbar the Torture Lawyers

May 15-17, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
King of the Hate Business

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

David Rosen
Sexual Torture: What is Acknowledged and What Remains Unknown

Mike Whitney
From My Lai to Bala Baluk: Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off

Bruce Page
A Real History of Rupert Murdoch

Jeremy Scahill
The Black Shirts of Guantánamo

Fred Gardner
Tortured Reasoning: Judge Bybee Rules Against Brian Epis

Tom Barry
Fighting the Drug War at Homeland Security

Mats Svensson
On the Beach in Tel Aviv

Ramzy Baroud
The Drones Are Coming

Mark Engler
Science Fiction From Below

Mark Weisbrot
Stealth Move by IMF to Get $100 Billion Without Congressional Debate

Farzana Versey
Of Scapegoats and Separatists

Ron Jacobs
It's Up to You to Save Troy Davis

Hannah Wolfe
What to Tell the Children

Cal Winslow
Fresno, the New Ground Zero in the Battle Between the SEIU and NUHW

David Macaray
Labor Needs a Southern Strategy

Christopher Brauchli
Involuntary Baptism

Mark Seth Lender
The Lion Tamer's Story

Robert Fantina
Lapel Pins, Arugula and Mustard

David Ker Thomson
Last Man Walking

Stephen Martin
Lipstick Nightmare for Spin Merchant

Charles R. Larson
Double Exile

Chase Madar
"Angels & Demons" and the Extraordinary Power of Imaginary Heretics

Kim Nicolini
Vaginas From Outer Space! Boldly Sitting Through Star Trek

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost

Lorenzo Wolff
Killer Virtues

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Jordan and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Catch F-22

May 14, 2009

Michael Hudson
Where Russia Went Wrong

Andy Worthington
The Poisoned Mosaic: Judge Condemns Guantánamo Evidence

Paul Craig Roberts
The Impotent President

Jonathan Cook
The Pope's Pilgrimage: Legitimizing Netanyahu?

Ray McGovern
See No Evil: Ugly Questions for General Myers

Lance Selfa
The Limits of Liberalism

David Green
The Deportation of Demjanjuk

Dave Lindorff
Obama Channels Cheney

Frida Berrigan
Nuclear Options

Sue Udry
The Bybee Question

Website of the Day
Our Bombs: Tracking US Air Strikes

May 13, 2009

Brian M. Downing
The Road Out of Iraq

Gareth Porter
Gen. McChrystal and Afghanistan

Robert Sandels
Obama and Latin America: No Light, All Tunnel

Ricardo Alarcón
Cuba: Measure of a Revolution

Eric Walberg
NATO in Georgia: Fun and Games

Dave Lindorff
The Sinking of GM: When Captains of Industry Don't Go Down with the Ship

Deepak Tripathi
A Culture of Abuse

William S. Lind
Back to the Balkans: Hillary and the Sleeping Dragon

Kevin Zeese
A Populist Health Care Rebellion

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon: From Perdition to Redemption?

Website of the Day
Beth McIntosh: The Wild Ride

May 12, 2009

Gary Leupp
The Bomb Iran Faction

Richard Neville
The AfPak Blues: Corpses of the Kids by the Truckload

Wajahat Ali
Obama Chooses a Reliable Dictatorship

Dean Baker
The Banker Boys Are Alright! Time to End the Bailouts

Franklin Lamb
What Palestinian Refugees Need From Lebanon's Elections

Norman Solomon
A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman

Paul Craig Roberts
Beware the Hate Crimes Bill

Lisa M. Hamilton
Let's Grow a New Crop of Farmers

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman:
Why Isn't Obama Turning to Credit Unions?

David Macaray
Wading Through the Grassroots

Website of the Day
Electronic Police States

May 11, 2009

Andrea Peacock
No Justice for Libby

Michael Hudson
Gordon Brown Spills the Beans on the IMF

Patrick Cockburn
Who Killed 120 Civilians?

Ralph Nader
The Single-Payer Taboo

John Kelly
Pseudoscience and Wrongful Convictions in the War on Drugs

Saul Landau
Cuba's Biggest "Crime"

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Dead Victims

David Michael Green
Get Obama

Anthony Papa
Gov. David Paterson Does the Right Thing

Paul Krassner
Jon Stewart and Truman, the War Criminal

Website of the Day
Generational Homelessness

May 8-10, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Dead Souls

Jeffrey St. Clair
Echoes of Amchitka: 40 Years After America's Biggest Nuclear Blast, the Damage Continues

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Steve Niva
Iraq: The Return of the Suicide Bombers

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

Mike Whitney
Has Bernanke Pulled the Economy Back From the Brink?

Warren Hinckle
DiFi vs. Marilyn Chambers

Serge Halimi
In Praise of Revolutions

Gareth Porter
The Pakistan Conundrum

Sharon Smith
Something Stinks at Whole Foods

Andy Worthington
Obama's New Gitmo Policy: Back to the Bush Era?

Mark Weisbrot
Hillary and Latin America

Rosa Miriam Elizalde Cyber Command and Cyber Dissident: More of the Same?

David Macaray
Recessions and Labor Unions

Missy Beattie
The Real Housewives of War

Ron Jacobs
Mothers and War

Diane Farsetta
About Face on Pentagon Pundits?

Ramzy Baroud
War Without Context

Phelie Maguire
Living Next to Settlers

Robert Fantina
Party of Rush

Kevin Zeese
A Break From the Past in the Drug War?

Margaret Flowers, MD
The Baucus 8: Why We Risked Arrest for Single-Payer

Dave Lindorff
The Joke's on Us

Richard Rhames
Revenge of the Tundra

Ben Sonnenberg
Let the Right One In: A Vampire Visits a Welfare State

Kim Nicolini
Sin Nombre: Giving Faces to People Who Don't Have Names

Stephen Martin
The Riotous Action of the Complete Banker

Charles R. Larson
The Commencement Address You'll Never Hear

David Yearsley
Jean Ferrard, Organist Extraordinary

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Cab for Cutie: Surprisingly Familiar

Poets' Basement
G.S. Heiligschreib and David Farrelly

Website of the Weekend
Zombie Bank

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

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...

Weekend Edition
May 29-31, 2009

A River of Acid

Mined Out in Zambia

By JEAN-CHRISTOPHE SERVANT

Peter and Irene, both 30, are engineering graduates of Lusaka university and have been working since 2006 in Chingola, a small Copperbelt town in Zambia in southern Africa . The couple are employed by Konkola Copper Mines (KCM), the biggest mining company in a country which earns more than half its gross domestic product from mineral extraction. KCM produces 70 per cent of the country’s copper and provides its employees, the children of neoliberalism, with a decent lifestyle: a net salary of 5m kwachas ($876) a month, plus shares they can cash in in 2010. They also enjoy professional status in a sector whose 400,000 employees earn an average monthly income of 2m kwachas ($350), while 68 per cent of the population of 11 million live on less than two dollars a day.

Of course Peter and Irene have had to make sacrifices. Irene’s job is to look after the chemicals used to treat the copper ore, and in 2007 she had to leave her husband and young child to go on a training course in India. The Indian multinational Vedanta has been the majority shareholder in KCM since 2004. The sale was the latest in a series of privatizations that began in the late 1990s, and in which 257 of Zambia’s 280 businesses left the public sector.

Nearly 100,000 people lost their jobs over this period, 40,000 of them from the country’s flagship company, Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), which was carved up into as many pieces as there were buyers. Vedanta got its hands on the biggest slice when it bought up the Chingola mine.

Irene has nothing but happy memories of her time in India. But when she returned to KCM she found some of her Zambian colleagues had been dismissed and replaced with young expatriate Indians “who are no more qualified, but better paid, housed in custom-built accommodation and given a company car”. While she was away, Peter had to deal with the sudden rise in price of essential goods, petrol and rent: their three-room flat and kitchen, infested with cockroaches and subject to regular power cuts, now cost them 2m kwachas ($350).

Then, on Christmas Eve last year, the rent fell to 1.7m kwachas ($298) – in tandem with a record fall in the price of copper, which dropped to $2,817 a tonne from more than $8,675 in July. The specter of mine closures re-emerged. It was a glum Christmas for the 20,000 or so permanent employees of the mining sector – three times fewer than the state sector had employed at the end of the 1970s. Employers and employees both had to economize to ride out the approaching financial storm: for workers, so they could afford the new school fees at the start of term on January 12, and for employers, so they could maintain their comfortable profit margins.

A river of acid

Vedanta’s Zambian subsidiary declared a turnover of nearly $122m in the final trimester of 2008 – almost half what they earned in the previous one. First they reduced their contracts with the mainly South African temping agencies, which had flourished after privatization. Thousands of underpaid and non-unionized workers, who had done the riskiest jobs, were laid off. Vedanta then resorted to other “sacrifices”, in order to maintain maximum input (its goal, written in large letters above the entrance to its Zambian complex). Suppliers had to wait a little longer to be paid – some went out of business. Working hours became longer: “four 12-hour days followed by two days off,” according to a local member of the largest union in the sector, the Miners Union of Zambia (MUZ). Even Peter, a model employee, says they are being pushed to the limit: “We have to be on call 24 hours a day. If this carries on, there will be more accidents.”

“Who benefited when the price of raw materials went up?” asks the economist James Lungu who teaches at Copperbelt University in Kitwe. “Mining companies and their shareholders. And who is suffering now the price is falling? Miners, their families, and the environment. We are on the verge of a social catastrophe.”

It takes 100 tonnes of ore to produce one tonne of copper. On November 6, 2006 the people living on the banks of the Kafue – which flows down towards Lusaka before joining the Zambezi further south – were confronted with a strange sight: the river had turned turquoise. Vedanta had accidentally discharged its toxic waste into it. Two million inhabitants of Chingola district – 100,000 of whom draw water directly from the river – were deprived of drinking water for at least two days. Thousands went for hospital check-ups after eating fish from the river. Analyses of the Kafue’s water showed it contained 38.5mg manganese, 10mg copper and 1mg cobalt per litre: concentrations 1.7 times, 10 times and 10.7 times higher respectively than the limits set by the World Health Organisation. With a pH of 1.5, the Kafue had become a river of acid.

The Vedanta employee who admitted the company’s responsibility was sacked on the spot. The multinational threatened to withdraw advertising from the state-owned daily Times of Zambia if the incident was reported. But the editors stood firm, and the scandal erupted. On the orders of the Environmental Council of Zambia, a public body charged with maintaining standards, Vedanta called a brief halt to its mining activities at Chingola. The company was indignant at losing $2.5m. Then business started up again. The price of copper continued to rise, and with it, the pollution.

An unauthorized visit to the massive Vedanta site during the rainy season revealed a vision from Dante’s Inferno: 3km from the mines, the pollution control dam was overflowing, spewing copper-coloured water, reeking of acid, into a tributary of the Kafue. “Of course we pollute,” said an employee, “but all the mines do.” “It was worse in ZCCM’s days,” retorted Sampa Chita, director of KCM’s social responsibility program. “We are fed up being blamed. You cannot run a mine without causing pollution.”

Vedanta is the only mineral extraction company in Zambia to have a department devoted to “the community”. In her empty office, devoid even of a computer, Chita estimated her budget, with some hesitation, at around “$12 or $13m”. The money is used to fight malaria and HIV/Aids, fund orphanages, pay university fees, dig wells and support the local cricket team – but not the football team. Chita refused to say if this is because Indians prefer cricket to football. But now, for the first time in its 60-year history, the Chingola copper mines’ football team, Nchanga Rangers, has been relegated to the second division.

Chita claimed not to know what her company’s profits are. When pressed, she admitted only that her department’s budget is tiny given the scale of the problems. “ZCCM had a social outlook – perhaps too social,” she added. “We are more focused on results. But is it wrong to want to make money? Mines need a lot of investment, and investors want to make a profit. You have to be realistic.” Three months after taking over 51per cent of KCM’s shares in 2004, Vedanta had already made a profit of $25m.

How the Mine Was Privatized

Lungu is co-author of an astounding report on the privatisation of the copper mines (Alastair Fraser and John Lungu, “For Whom the Windfalls? Winners and Losers in the Privatisation of Zambia’s Copper Mines”, Report for Civil Society Trade Network of Zambia, Lusaka, January 2007).The sale was orchestrated by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) – including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – under the government of President Frederick Chiluba, who was Zambia’s second head of state, between 1991 and 2001. He has been charged with embezzling $500,000 of public funds, and his trial is due to resume this year.

“ZCCM’s privatization was carried out with a complete lack of transparency, no debate in parliament, and with one-sided contracts which few of us have ever seen,” explained Lungu. “It has never profited the inhabitants of the Copperbelt. Nor its environment.”

His view is shared up by Edith Nawakwi, Zambia’s former finance minister, who oversaw the privatizations. Her testimony says a lot about the behaviour of the IFIs: “We were told by advisers, who included the IMF and the World Bank, that not in my lifetime would the price of copper change. All the production models that could be employed were showing that, for the next 20 years, Zambian copper would not make a profit. Conversely, if we privatized, we would be able to access debt relief, and this was a huge carrot in front of us – like waving medicine in front of a dying woman. We had no option but to go ahead” .

In recent years international media attention has focused on the social responsibility of Chinese companies in the Copperbelt. More than 40 years after building the Tanzam railway, linking Zambia to the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, China has made a comeback. The nationalist third worldist ideology of the past has given way to a more pragmatic approach. Beijing is now the third biggest investor in sub-Saharan Africa. But the initial good feelings engendered by China’s “win-win” discourse faded in April 2005, when the Chinese dynamite factory near Chambishi exploded, killing 52 people. The factory had been contracted out by Non-Ferrous Company-Africa (NFCA), itself a subsidiary of the China Non-Ferrous Metal Industry’s Foreign Engineering and Construction Company. Anti-Chinese sentiment hit the roof. The Chinese president Hu Jintao, on an official visit in February 2007, even had to cancel a tour of the mining belt.

Employees of the Chinese mining companies are denied union rights and their conditions are probably worse than for those working for Canadian, Swiss or South African multinationals. But for all that, Sam Mulafulafu, head of the Catholic charity Caritas in Zambia, says: “It is important to remember it wasn’t the Chinese companies who privatiz]ed copper.” The new globalized Zambia is pursued by companies from every corner of the globe, but the Bench Marks Foundation, based in South Africa, notes that many of these multinationals apply much lower standards in terms of health, security and respect for the environment in Zambia than they do in the developed countries where they are based.

In January 2008 acid waste from Chingola’s mines reached the ground water at Mufulira, around 40km away. More than 800 people in the township adjoining the Mopani Copper Mines (MCM) complained of diarrhoea, abdominal pain and vomiting. The mine is co-owned by the Swiss group Glencore and the Canadian company First Quantum, and the joint venture was set up with the help of the European Investment Bank.

Accidents like these increase what two young Zambian researchers call the “ecological debt”. Economist Nachilala Nkombo and legal expert Brenda Mofya say the environment has been sacrificed on the altar of privatization: “Unlike the financial debt, the creditors this time are the Zambian people. Though linked to Zambia’s financial debt, the ecological debt is far larger than Zambia’s $7bn financial debt was at its peak” .

The mining townships of Mufulira are stark reminders of this ecological debt. One of the worst is Kankoyo, home to 30,000 people, and a canker on an otherwise fertile and verdant landscape. Only two things grow here: avocado trees and cactus. Open sewers, dilapidated shacks with tin roofs corroded by acid rain, abandoned pharmacies, grocers shops with broken windows – the local population maintain these vestiges of the ZCCM’s social programme as best they can.

‘They don’t listen to us’

Kankoyo also lies downwind of the smoke spewing out of MCM’s blast furnace: on some days the township is smothered in a choking fog. Every year nearly 700,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide is released into the air. Cholera is common. And unrest grows as unemployment rises. MCM’s armed guards sit on plastic chairs on top of the slag heaps, watching out for illegal miners searching for minerals among the waste.

A heavy contaminated air envelops the former hospital where Percy Chanda, MP for Mufulira district and member of the main opposition party, the Patriotic Front, has his office. “I am not against foreign companies – we need them,” he said. “But the way they have behaved in the Copperbelt is very regrettable. They don’t listen to us. Imagine you came to my house, and I made you a meal. You would probably offer to help with the dishes. But here they just sit still at the table, without lifting a finger, waiting for the next course.” A former miner, Chanda remembers “the good old days” of the ZCCM: a state within a state that looked after every aspect of workers’ lives from birth to death. Everything from housing, education and health care, to evening classes and sports clubs was run by the ZCCM – they would even change your light bulbs, people used to joke.

Chanda was still a miner when Zambia – caught between ZCCM’s losses of $713,000 a day and the offer of debt relief – accepted the advice of the IFIs. At that time copper was worth about $2,500 a tonne. A militant member of the mining union during the post-privatization cutbacks, Chanda finally hung up his miner’s hat in 2006 when he became an MP: “I have never been able to find out anything about the agreement that was reached on privatization. Nor about what profits have been made since. I feel I am banging my head against a brick wall.”

When copper prices began to rise, Chanda tried to negotiate a pay rise for miners. “They told us we couldn’t benefit from the price rise, because they had sold their copper in advance at the previous year’s prices. Now they tell us they have to lay us off because of the price drop. But they are still selling at September’s prices when they were at their peak! But you know it’s not safe being in hostile territory, surrounded by your enemies. One of these days they’ll regret what they did to us.”

Everything is for sale

The financial storm has hit the Luanshya Copper Mines (LCM), an Israeli-Swiss joint venture registered in the Netherlands, which has just sacked its 1,300 permanent staff. LCM’s director, Derek Webbstock, says business will resume when the price of copper goes back up. The atmosphere is gloomy in the mining town. Around 60 policemen have been sent to guard the entrance to the complex, but LCM has already sent its mining equipment – sawhorses and piping cut up into pieces – to South Africa by lorry.

Nothing is wasted – it can all be reused, and sold.

It is rumored the Chinese may take over the mine. At the mini-market, customers count their pennies, and worry about Christmas. The local union representative, Boniface Kabwe, has four children. The abruptness of the closure knocked him sideways. “In October some miners tried to borrow money from the local bank, but they were told they didn’t have enough security. The bank seemed to know the mine would close before the government did! In fact, [the government] was the last to know.”

Up to now relations between LCM and the local population have been reasonable. Unlike other mining companies, LCM had kept the road to Luanshya in good repair. In fact the town was voted the cleanest in the Copperbelt last year, in a competition dating back to ZCCM days. Two-thirds of the local council’s revenue – more than 1.2bn kwachas ($210,000) in the last six months of last year – came from local taxes paid by LCM.

“They told us recently that they had enough funds to stay open despite the financial crisis,” says Mutakela Kayonde, a Luanshya town planning official. “It’s not just the miners who are affected by the closure. With eight people to a household, it’s the whole community.” Like an increasing number of people in the Copperbelt, including local correspondents from the national press, Kayonde is beginning to wonder what’s going on. Has the collapse in the price of copper given businesses another opportunity to blackmail Zambia’s government?

Last spring the Zambian government finally decided to review its mining contracts. It raised corporate tax from 25 per cent to 30 per cent , and tax on profits went up from a miserable 0.6per cent to 3 per cent . The World Bank – forced to recognize how modest the Zambian treasury’s share had been up to then – supported the measure. Zambia was getting nothing out of the exploitation of its copper reserves, while the multinationals were making a handsome profit. The mining companies had even set up crafty systems to avoid paying taxes by channelling their profits through offshore companies in islands like Mauritius. In 2006 Zambia earned $133m from copper exports estimated to be worth $3bn.

Mining companies made $3bn from copper extraction last year. But of the $421m that should have made its way into Zambia’s state coffers, only $200m was actually collected. Even though Zambia has some of the lowest taxes in southern Africa, the multinationals contested them, threatening to take their disagreement to a commercial court – in their home countries. That was before the risk of redundancies, on the back of falling prices, offered them a new way to put pressure on the Zambian government.

It seems they have achieved their objective. After winning a narrow victory at the end of October 2008, following the death of his predecessor Levy Mwanawasa, President Rupiah Banda announced that his government was having discussions with the mining companies – on cutting taxes: “We must ensure that we do not kill the goose that lays the golden egg. There is little point in taking in a few million dollars in tax if thousands of jobs are lost as a result”. (The Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa, who was re-elected in 2006, died 19 August 2008 in a Paris hospital. The opposition candidate Michael Sata, popular in the Copperbelt, again lost his bid to be president in the election of October 2008. Now much less critical of Chinese businesses than in 2006, he told me he planned to stand for a fourth time in 2011.)

Fred M’Membe runs the main Zambian opposition daily The Post, which started up in Chiluba’s day. Sporting a South African communist party cap, and going around in a Hummer 4X4, he is now one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the country, both from his editorials and his stake in the new Zambian economy. “Our government opened the doors wide to foreign businesses, but didn’t leave itself the possibility of closing them again. The economic policy of a country cannot be dictated by agreements made with private businesses,” said the business magnate. “It’s true privatisation did create a certain amount of hope. But now the Hollywood movie is over and reality has hit with the global financial crisis. The only solution is for the state to move back into the mining sector. Cooperatives or nationalization, it doesn’t matter. The people should be the first to profit from the mines.”

Kabwe’s zinc and lead deposits used to be the richest in Africa. After almost a century of exploitation by the South African giant Anglo American they were finally abandoned, almost exhausted, in the mid-1990s. Now, despite a campaign to clean up the site funded by the World Bank, this town of 300,000 inhabitants is one of the ten most polluted industrial towns on the planet, according to the Blacksmith Institute . The average level of lead in the blood of children is reported to be between five and 10 times higher than the limit set by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Illegal miners from the nearby townships dig around in the rubbish tips for bits of manganese, copper or cobalt ore which they can sell on in 100kg bags to middle-men. Their fathers worked for the mines. It’s a risky job – three young men were killed in 2007 when a tip caved in – but it’s their only means of survival.

High levels of lead dust in the soil and heavy metals in the water within a 20km radius of the town are having a harmful effect on agriculture. On the road up to Lusaka, fields of maize and stalls selling mushrooms the size of umbrellas are reminders, however, that Zambia is as rich in arable land as it is in minerals. Many former miners, casualties of privatisation, have returned to work their family’s land.

In its obsession with mineral resources, though, Zambia has neglected its agriculture: 80 per cent of the rural population lives below the poverty line. Peter Kapumba – a former ZCCM employee, built like a boxer, his eyes drained of color by all the mining chemicals – lives with three generations of his family on an old colonial farm. “Life is hard,” he said. “But it’s better here than in town. I think farming is the future for this country. As long as the government makes up its mind to diversify the economy. It’s about time too. One day there will be no more copper. The only thing left will be the pollution.”

Since this winter another 8,000 Zambian miners have been laid off.

Translated by Stephanie Irvine

Jean-Christophe Servant is a journalist.

This article appears in the May edition of thexcellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

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