Today's Stories

July 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Lock and Load--It's the Law!

Nicole Colson
The Ethanol Scam

Stan Cox
Fixing a Broken Agriculture

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Is There an Oil Shortage?

Wajahat Ali /
Omid Safi
The Future of Iran: an Interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi

John Stauber
There May be a Left, But is it Moving? An Interview with David Sirota

Alan Farago
The Crash of the King of Liquidity

Missy Beattie
Dark Neighborhoods

Robert Fantina
Bush's Last Yes Man: Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak Hires the Mosque

Gregory Kafoury
After the Obama Betrayal

Fran Shor
The Audacity of Hype

Martha Rosenberg
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

David Macaray
Will There be an Actors Strike?

Andrew Wimmer
No Lies! No War!

Farzana Versey
The Kashmir Chiaroscuro

Website of the Weekend
Parsing Jesse Ventura

July 11, 2008

Kevin Alexander Gray
Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Historical Amnesia and the Shoot Down of Iran Air Flight 655

Peter Morici
Breaking Down the Trade Deficit

Mike Whitney
Worse Than McCain?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Oiling the War Machine

Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

Ramzy Baroud
The Not-So-Historic Barak-Talabani Handshake

Kelly Overton
If There is a Chimp Heaven

Adrian Burgos
In Praise of Jules Tygiel

Website of the Day
Wendell Berry on Mountaintop Removal

July 10, 2008

Brian McKenna
McCain's Melanoma Cover-Up

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching Greed Murder the Economy

Saul Landau
Mississippi River Blues

Ron Jacobs
Who Will Leave Iraq First?

Joshua Frank
Cutting Deals with Big Timber's Darth Vader

Peter Morici
What's Driving the Wall Street Rout

Alan Maass
Jesse Helms Finally Does the Right Thing

Robert Weissman
Humanitarian Failure at the G8

William Blum
Dr. Strangelove

Alan Farago
Coral Reef Meltdown

Website of the Day
Lieberman Must Go!

July 9, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Are They Really Oil Wars?

Luis Rodriguez
The Deadly Fallout from Gang Injunctions

Sheldon Richman
What's Wrong with Selling Your Vote?

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Lessons from Sa'di of Shiraz on "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

Chad Hanson
Blowing Smoke: Logging Industry Lies on Forest Fires and Climate Change

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Problems with the FISA Bill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Defining Deviancy Down with FISA

Dave Lindorff
Paul Krugman's Blind Spot

Stanley Heller
A Damned Good Assembly

Philip Rizk
Sick at the Gaza Crossing

Website of the Day
Mumia on Nader

July 8, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Riding the Colombia Gravy Train

Laura Carlsen
North America Doesn't Exist: the New Geography of Trade

Mike Whitney
Bush's Rampage in Somalia

Andy Worthington
Scandal at Diego Garcia

Patrick Irelan
The Empire Goes to the Movies

Chellis Glendinning
The Un-tied States of America

David Macaray
A Union Story

Dave Lindorff
Mumia's Long-Shot Appeal

John Chuckman
The Myths of Independence Day

Phillip Doe
FISA and the Decline of America

Website of the Day
Daniel Ellsberg on Warrantless Wiretap Bill

July 7, 2008

Patrick Bond
Can Reparations for Apartheid Profits be Won in US Courts?

Kathy Kelly
Cold Shoulders

Andy Worthington
Repatriation as Russian Roulette

Clifton Ross
A Rescue Staged for the Screen

Elizabeth Schulte
Obama's War Room

Ralph Nader
The Patriotism of Deeds

Dave Lindorff
Keeping Count

Binoy Kampmark
The World According to Jesse Helms

Stephen Fleischman
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change

Website of the Day
Time for a Change

July 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Could Anyone be "Worse" Than Bush?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land

Patrick Cockburn
Blowback from a Strike on Iran

Mike Whitney
Hunkering Down in Afghanistan with Field Marshall Obama

Robert Fantina
Obama, Iraq and Change

Binoy Kampmark
The Anwar Case: Snitching and Sodomizing

Rannie Amiri
Can Nasrallah Unite Lebanon?

Eric Ruder
Hidden Casualties

Brian Cloughley
Israel Flexes Its Muscles

William Blum
Some Thoughts on Patriotism

Frank Barat
The One-Word Solution

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Phony Pollution Accounting

David Yearsley
Rubbert Shines, as US Envoy Puts Foot in His Mouth

Ron Jacobs
U.S. Blues

Karim Makdisi
On Soccer and Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Thompson /
Chris Kutalik
What Can We Learn from the American Axle Strike?

N.D. Jayaprakash
The NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament

Ramzy Baroud
Journalistic Imperatives

Kelly Overton
Animal Rights and Obama

Richard Neville
Bitch Fights and Tomorrow's Top Model

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Gibbons, Matson and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Ginsberg and Cassady on "Extremists"

July 4, 2008

Kathy Kelly
Istiklal

Dave Lindorff
My War Story

Paul Krassner
Confessions of a Barista

Jackie Corr
In the Footsteps of Evel Knievel: Obama Heads Back to Butte

Laray Polk
Military-Industrial Convergence

Dan Bacher
Dead Runs: Salmon Fishing Banned in Central Valley Rivers

Walter Brasch
The Rocket's Red Glare--May be Chinese

Charles Modiano
Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Independence Day

July 3, 2008

Sharon Smith
Exxon's Legal Guardians

Andy Worthington
Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA and the Elephant in the Room

Peter Morici
Crisis Grips the Jobs Market

Ramzi Kysia
Breaking Into a Prison

Martha Rosenberg
Mandatory School Milk and the Early Death of Football Players

Anne Landman
Who Really Benefits From Voluntary Codes of Corporate Conduct?

Dave Zirin
Grand Theft Hoops

Kristin Bricker
US Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

Website of the Day
Bush Tours America to Survey Damage from His Presidency

July 2, 2008

Patrick Irelan
Holy Obama

Vijay Prashad
Lunch with Karzai

Brian Cloughley
Sense of Honor, French and US Style

Ralph Nader
Economic Domino Theory

Robert Fantina
General Stupidity: McCain, Obama and Clark

Dave Lindorff
What's So Special About Veterans?

Parvez Ahmed
Obama and Those Pesky Muslim Rumors

Robert Bryce
The Democrats and Off-Shore Drilling

Website of the Day
King Corn: Q&A

July 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch

Mike Whitney
Getting to the Heart of America's Economic Crisis: an Interview with Michael Hudson

Douglas Macgregor
Obama's General?

Steven Higgs
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
The Global Seed Police

Dave Lindorff
Blood Money Democrats

Roger Burbach
Fighting Food Fascism

Richard W. Behan
The Story Behind George Bush's Lies

Gary Leupp
The McCain Edge Among Voters on Iraq

Website of the Day
Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice

June 30, 2008

Peter Lee
Did a Plutonium Generator End Up in the Ganges?

Jeff Sommers
Burying the Bloody Shirt; A New Age for Latvia Dawns? "Astatu Loskutovu!"

David Macaray
The AFL-CIO Votes to Endorse Obama

Martha Rosenberg
Sex Work is Different from Sex Slavery, aver Carnal Toilers

David Price
Blind Whistling Phreaks and the FBI's Historical Reliance on Phone Tap Criminality

Alexandra Early
Report from El Salvador: Why They All Keep Coming

June 28 / 29, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Guess What "Surprise" Republicans Yearn For

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nike's Bad Air

Joan P. Mencher
The Human Right to Eat

Nikolas Kozloff
Nader, Obama and White Talk

Jason Hribal
Tillie, Elephants and the Zoo

Alan Maass
Obama Swerves Right

Robert Fantina
Iraq and the New York Times

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
It Was Oil, All Along

Mike Whitney
A Glimmer of Light in Television Wasteland

Justin E. H. Smith
Collective Guilt and the Fate of Kosovo

Pham Binh
The Mendacity of Hope

David Yearsley
The Rest is Noise

Christopher Ketcham
19 Aphorisms

Jeremy R. Hammond
Bush and the Press vs. the Constitution

Kathleen M. Barry
An Open Letter to Barney Frank on Israel

Walter Brasch
Politics and Animal Cruelty in Pennsylvania

Brett Drugge
A Field Trip to the Reagan Library

Susie Day
Sex Sans the City

Website of the Day
How to Expose a Hypocritcal Politician

June 27, 2008

Franklin C. Spinney
The Defense Reform Trap

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Encaging of Gaza

Brian Cloughley
Chaos in Afghanistan

Saree Makdisi
Occupation by Bureaucracy

Liliana Segura
Reactionary Change: Obama and the Death Penalty

Paul Krassner
Remembering George Carlin

William S. Lind
The War and the Yellow Press

Candace Cohn
Embracing Big Brother

Ron Jacobs
What's a Voter to Do?

Binoy Kampmark
Beached in Chile

Website of the Day
Zoom Uganda

June 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Who's Actually Winning in Iraq?

Nikolas Kozloff
Kinder and Gentler Assassination Techniques? Obama Waffles on School of the Americas

William P. O'Connor
The Drone of Experts

Saul Landau
McClellan's Mini Mea Culpa

Ashley Smith
Which Way Forward for the Antiwar Movement?

Dave Lindorff
Our Kids and Their Kids: Terrorists or Victims?

David Macaray
A Brief History of Union Negotiations

Binoy Kampmark
Warming Seats at the Hague: John Howard and War Crimes

Matt Reichel
There's No Hope at the Ballot Box

Remi Kenazi
You Don't Mess With the Racism!

Website of the Day
A Movement Afoot in the Heartlands

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Weekend Edition
July 12 / 13, 2008

Forging a Politics Worthy of the Landscape

The Origins of the Western Greens

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

This essay is excerpted from Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance From the Heartland edited by Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair (AK Press, 2008).

For thirty-five years the Democratic Party has enjoyed a nearly unquestioned hegemony over environmental politics, even though the greatest gains for the Earth were made during the Nixon administration.

In fact, environmentalists, along with civil rights and pro-abortion groups, have long constituted the activist core of the party: they have been its most effective organizers, most faithful (and forgiving) voters and most aggressive fundraisers.

But out in the American West there are signs that this long-standing relationship is heading for a crack-up. In several key western states,  New Mexico, Montana, and Arizona, where the lines of separation between Republicans and Democrats have blurred to indistinction, have been launching independent and third party campaigns with the premeditated intent of evicting Democrats from seats they have long held. Encrusted incumbents, they call them.

The reason: mounting anger at the Democratic Party’s neglect and, in many instances, active subversion of pro-environmental policies, particularly regarding the forests and rivers on federal lands in the West.

The price of these independent campaigns may well be the election of more Republicans to federal and state offices. But this is an outcome that many greens are willing to accept as the down payment on building a new political movement—and as a just political punishment for past abuses.

“The Democrats now represent a far greater danger to the environment than Republicans,” asserts Tim Hermach, director of the Native Forest Council in Eugene, Oregon. “Clinton and Gore damaged our cause more in eight years, than the Republicans did in twelve.”

Similar sentiments course through the campfire conversations of environmental activists across the West, a region that has lacked a true environmental champion in the Congress since the defeat of Senator Frank Church in 1980.

Green activists aren’t alone in their disgust with the two-party system. A poll in the Los Angeles Times disclosed that 54  percent of American voters support the rise of a third party. The support is strongest among liberals (64  percent) and Westerners (60  percent).

Ironically, it took the end of divided government and the election to the presidency of a politician who came of age during the ascendancy of environmentalism as political force to fuel a discontent that had been smoldering for years.

Most greens greeted the election of Bill Clinton and Al Gore with a queasy optimism. While the Clinton/Gore campaign placed environmental protection and public lands reform near the top of the agenda, Bill Clinton was something of a known quantity. His record as governor of Arkansas, fused with his neo-liberal rhetoric, suggested a governmental posture that would sacrifice environmental quality for political expediency or the appeasement of corporate backers.

Even so, the pro-environment themes, expertly deployed during the 1992 campaign by Al Gore, played well across the country, particularly in the West, where Clinton captured seven crucial states. The Western Strategy, which proved pivotal to Clinton’s election, was decidedly green in tone. It appealed to the changing demographics of the New West: suburbanized, soft-tech, mobile and capitalizing on the environmental amenities, and not the extractable commodities, of the Western landscape.

Within months of taking office, the Clinton administration began to beat a hasty retreat from its commitment to environmental protection. In March 1993, at the first hint of opposition from old-style Democratic politicians in the West, the administration backed off of its already timid proposal to reform archaic mining, timber and livestock grazing policies. An agitated Jay Hair, the usually temperate director of the National Wildlife Federation, condemned the betrayal as a case of political “date rape.”

This was swiftly followed by a seriously compromised plan for the management of the national forests in the Pacific Northwest, home of the Northern Spotted Owl and endangered stocks of Pacific salmon and steelhead trout. Many long-time forest activists viewed the Clinton plan, known as Option 9, as worse than proposals offered during the first Bush administration that were deemed illegal by federal courts.  Scientists predicted that Option 9 would not stop the spotted owl’s slide toward extinction. But Clinton, Gore and Bruce Babbitt pushed their plan forward, steamrolling their former allies in the big green groups, and in 1994 new timber sales in ancient forests were being offered for sale to timber companies for the first time in six years—a feat that had eluded Bush the Elder. These were Clinton-created clearcuts and his administration boasted proudly of them.

Further backsliding followed, including relaxed pesticide standards; weakened regulations for the Endangered Species Act; a plan for the Everglades tailored to meet the demands of the sugar barons and real estate moguls of South Florida; failure to take decisive action to protect Columbia River salmon due to opposition from Speaker of the House Tom Foley and the aluminum companies; and the political firing of Jim Baca from his position as director of the Bureau of Land Management for his determination to reform grazing practices on federal lands.

Most of these policy flip-flops were engineered at the behest of Western Democrats, whose prevailing political strategy could be summed up this way: ignore the environmentalists; distance yourself from their issues; they will vote for you regardless of what you do.  This regressive behavior has been repeatedly reinforced by mainstream and corporate conservation organizations, who almost unilaterally endorse Democratic candidates, even those with stunted environmental records.

Thus, early into the Clinton administration, environmental activists found themselves in the position of the Christian right during the reign of Reagan and Bush the Father: all packed up, but nowhere to go. While some conservationists resigned themselves to another era of environmental mediocrity, others decided to make a decisive split from a party that incessantly talked environmental values, while doing the dirty work of the corporate polluters.

The first shot in this rebellion was fired in Montana in the spring of 1994 by an unlikely candidate at an equally unlikely, but extremely vulnerable, incumbent. Steve Kelly, an artist and hard-core environmental organizer from Bozeman, launched an independent campaign against eight-term incumbent Pat Williams, a liberal Democrat, for Montana’s sole congressional seat. Williams, who won his last election by the slimmest margin in the House, was majority whip and was viewed by the Clinton administration as a key player on health care and environmental matters.

Correctly fearing that any attrition of votes from the left might doom Williams, the Democrats desperately tried to knock Kelly off the ballot, a tactic they would later use against Ralph Nader. But Kelly fought them off. Even though Kelly was a political novice who had never before run for public office and was so cash-strapped that his campaign couldn’t even print bumperstickers or yard signs, early polling showed that he had won the support of nearly 10  percent of Montana voters. This showing prompted the Rothenberg Political Report, viewed as a something akin to Biblical prophecy by Beltway savants, to suggest that Kelly’s campaign might tilt the Montana race toward the Republican challenger, Cy Jamison. Jamison, an ideological clone of James Watt, became notorious as Bush’s Bureau of Land Management chief for his numerous attempts to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act, actions which incurred repeated reprimands from federal courts.

The national Democratic Party and Clinton took the threat to Williams’s seat seriously. In an effort to redeem the congressman’s reputation as true green, the Administration deployed Al Gore to Missoula for a public booster session. This was a risky mission for the Ozone Man, because the more tightly the White House was seen to embrace Williams, the more the congressman tended to squirm to the right of the administration. Shortly after Gore’s pit-stop in Montana, Williams told the Seattle Times that he believed the Clinton administration “was making the same mistakes in trying to protect the land under Bruce Babbitt that the Reagan admininstration made early on in trying to use up the land under James Watt. Both came at it ideologically and went too far.” With progressive congressmen like this, Kelly asked, who misses the likes of Ron Marlenee?

Montana and Idaho contain more than 15 million acres of federally-owned wildlands, the last refuge of the grizzly bear, gray wolf and bull trout. This is the largest swath of unprotected wild forest land outside of Alaska, but much of it, indeed most of it, is threatened by clearcut logging, roadbuilding and gold mining. In 1989, Kelly co-founded the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, a hard-nosed environmental group based in Missoula that developed the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), a visionary piece of legislation that would protect all of these wildlands as either federal wilderness areas or national parks. While NREPA, probably the last hope of keeping the grizzly from going extinct, steadily gained support in Congress, serious consideration of the bill’s merits was obstructed by Williams, who used his leadership position in the House to deny hearings on NREPA and push forward his own bill, which would have opened 4 million acres of wildland in Montana alone to clearcutting by timber giants such as Plum Creek and Champion International.

Kelly’s anger at the anti-environmental policies of Williams, Jamison and the Clinton administration spurred his decision to run for Congress. “The Clinton administration was retreating from its campaign pledges to protect our public lands and Pat Williams played a key role in pushing them in that direction,” Kelly told me. “Williams repeatedly voted against mining reform, grazing reform and measures to end subsidies to multinational timber companies. Worst of all, from my point of view here in Bozeman, Williams sponsored anti-wilderness legislation that condemns 4 million acres in Montana to logging and mining. Cy Jaminson’s record spoke for itself. He never pretended to be anything but what he was: a voice for pillage.”

As it turned out, Kelly was far from a single issue candidate. He was pro-choice, anti-nuke, an advocate for campaign finance reform and a single-payer health care system. But the issue that drove him to make his decision bolt from the Democratic Party was the party’s environmental betrayals.

Polls in Montana showed that Kelly was on to something. A few weeks prior to the election, a poll conducted by Lee Newspapers (a statewide chain in Montana) showed that 32  percent of Montanans supported passage of NREPA, a bill Kelly helped to write. By contrast, only 14  percent of Montana voters backed Williams’s timber-industry oriented bill.

He didn’t shy away from being labeled a spoiler, either. “I ran to win,” Kelly said. “But if Williams and I had both lost and Jamison had won, it would have been a victory for Montana wildlands. Jamison never would have wielded the kind of power that Williams did.”

This kind of unrepentant attitude earned Kelly the enmity of many liberals and prompted a testy rebuke from The Missoulian, a long-time backer of Williams. The paper’s editorial writers carped at Kelly for “waging an environmental jihad—a holy war in which anyone opposed to NREPA is an expendable infidel.”

For his part, Pat Williams sniped that Kelly’s campaign threatened to wreck “the carefully constructed coalition between labor and conservationists. It will be a generation before it comes back.”

But the marriage of labor and greens was chimerical at best, made up of labor leaders who had sold our workers to maintain a cordial relationship with transnationals such as Plum Creek Timber and professional conservationists who have traded off millions of acres of wildlands to secure ready access to politicians.

“If these independent political campaigns cause some conservative Republicans to get elected, well at least we don’t have to guess where they are on an issue,” said Larry Tuttle, director of the Portland-based Center for Environmental Equity. “Frankly, when it comes to changing the incentives that lead to environmental destruction, evironmentalists often have more in common with the National Taxpayers Union than with many incumbent Democrats.”

Tuttle, who formerly headed the Wilderness Society’s office in Portland and ran for congress as a Democrat in 1986 and 1988, points to the fact that the Democrat-controlled Congress annually awards nearly a billion dollars worth of subsidies for logging, mining and grazing on public lands. These subsidies are a legacy of the progressive “job creation” policies from the Great Depression (and earlier), which have long since been captured and perverted by multinational corporations, such as Louisiana-Pacific, Chevron and Noranda Gold, that feed off the public lands and the federal treasury.

Kelly and other independent greens hope to forge a new kind of politics in the West, mining regional veins of anarchism, anti-authoritarianism and libertarianism. “I told people I was running to the right of Jamison on fiscal issues and to the left of Pat Williams on most social issues and the environment.”

Meanwhile, down in New Mexico, the spirited uprising of El Partido Verde, which ran a slate of candidates for local, state and federal offices beginning in 1994, threatens to topple the Democrats’ long-standing stranglehold on the state house and establish a permanent and powerful new presence on the political landscape across the Southwest.

“El Partido Verde is a coming together of various people’s movements, which have been disenfranchised by the pro-business policies of the Democratic Party: environmentalists, Hispanics, Native Americans and social justice groups,” Pat Wolff told me. Wolff is a Santa Fe environmentalist and animal rights organizer who ran as a green candidate for state land commissioner, a position once held by Jim Baca. She was the first woman to seek that office.

A kind of Southwest Rainbow Coalition, El Partido Verde is a potentially explosive mix that is being emulated across the West. Hispanics and Native Americans alone account for more than 50  percent of the population of New Mexico, who have long been treated as electoral chattel by the Democratic Party. The initial platform statement of El Partido Verde called for campaign finance reform, assistance for community-based businesses, property tax relief for homeowners and small farmers, single-payer health care and strong environmental protection standards. “This is what the Democratic Party should have been about all along,” Roberto Mondragón told me.

Mondragón is a Hispanic radio commentator and publisher of bi-lingual books, who served two terms as the Lt. Governor of New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. He ran on the El Partido Verde ticket for governor, challenging three-term Democratic incumbent Bruce King, a multi-millionaire rancher with a dismal environmental record, which includes support for a large nuclear waste dump near Carlsbad. King also vetoed numerous bills attempting to reform grazing, logging and mining on state lands. In that first election cycle, the candidates in El Partido Verde garnered between 10 and 30  percent of the vote, despite running on a miniscule campaign budget. “Look out,” said party chairman Abraham Gutmann of Taos. “We are the third force in Western politics.”

The environmental establishment and other Democratic Party loyalists were not amused. They hissed that such defections only throw elections to right-wing conservatives, viciously hostile to all that the liberal elites hold dear. Jim Baca, for example, who narrowly lost a primary challenge to Bruce King, refused to support the candidacy of his friend Mondragón, saying such campaigns “balkanize the political process.”

Of course, that’s precisely the goal of many of the new crop of greens, who see the two-party system as corrupt and undemocratic duopoly controlled by financial elites, imperialists and corporations. It was past time for a break up.

In 1994, I wrote a profile of Steve Kelly’s Montana campaign for the Sunday Outlook Section of the Washington Post. Two days later the Sierra Club, which has long engaged in an incestuous relationship with the national Democratic Party, lashed out, trashing Kelly and other Greens, in a sad attempt to salvage the pitiful campaigns of their pseudo-environmentalists bosses in Congress.

“Green Party candidates support radical environmental change, and in some cases that’s good and necessary, but they have zero chance of winning,” chirped Daniel Weiss, the Sierra Club’s national political director. Weiss delivered this strange assessment shortly after announcing his organization’s unequivocal support for Kelly’s opponent, Pat Williams, despite the fact that the Montana congressman rated a mere 54  percent (out of 100) on the Sierra Club’s own political scorecard. This is how the Beltway Green became the mavens of mediocrity.

More and more environmentalists, however, are ignoring the ultimatums of Gang Green. They have concluded that the demolition of the Democratic Party’s ruling superstructure is the only real hope for saving what remains of the Western ecosystems. “The legacy of electing candidates who are only marginally better than their opponents is readily apparent from the West’s continuing loss of salmon, forests and natural deserts,” says Larry Tuttle.

The green uprising spreading across the West represents a permanent renunciation of the pro-business policies enacted by the neo-liberals who have dominated the Democratic Party for the last two decades. It also signals the birth of a vigorous and principled new political movement that finds its most vibrant expression in the independent and third party campaigns.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

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Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont