Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
November 5, 2003
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
November
5, 2003
Just a Match Away
Fire
Sale in So Cal
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Sooner or later all big fires become political
events.
Even before becalmed Santa Ana winds
and mountain sleet quenched the blazes in southern California,
politicians from both parties raced to exploit the charred landscape
for their own advantage--a kind of political looting while the
embers still glowed.
Republicans, naturally, pointed an incendiary
finger at environmentalists, rehashing their tired mantra that
restrictions on logging had provided the kindling for the inferno
that consumed 3,600 homes (largely in Republican districts) and
took 20 human lives (the non-human body count will never be tallied).
Not to be outdone, Democrats parroted
a similar line, but in more bombastic tones. They tried to affix
the blame on Bush, alleging that our chainsaw president had rebuffed
desperate pleas from Gray Davis for money to finance the logging
off of beetle-nibbled forests in the parched San Bernadino Mountains.
So here the two parties converge once
again, harmonized in their fatuous contention that more logging
will prevent forest conflagrations. It didn't take long for this
unity, soldered by the flames of southern California, to find
a way to express itself in Congress.
On Halloween Eve, the Senate passed the
so-called Healthy Forest Initiative with only a 14 votes of dissent.
This bill is the no-holds-barred logging plan crafted by Bush's
forest czar, Mark Rey, a former ace timber industry lobbyist
who now oversees the Forest Service from his perch as Deputy
Secretary
of Agriculture. Using fire prevention as a pretext, the legislation
authorizes a kind of pre-emptive strike of logging across more
than 20 million acres of federal lands. It also exempts the blitzkrieg
of cutting from adherence to most environmental laws and shields
it from legal challenges by pesky green groups.
Although environmentalists roundly derided
the plan as a gift to big timber, it was embraced and championed
in the senate by a cohort of top rank Democrats, including California's
Dianne Feinstein, Oregon's Ron Wyden and Montana's Max Baucus,
the political playmate of celeb enviro Robert Redford. The version
of the bill that passed the senate was spun as a compromised
brokered by these three luminaries. In fact, it was essentially
same the bill that Rey dreamed up for Bush and his backers in
big timber and the building industry. Except the Democrats were
more generous, increasing the funding for the $2.9 billion plan
by $289 million more than even the White House requested.
Feinstein, long a favorite of the Sierra
Club, was the lead perpetrator of soothing myths about the bill.
"This legislation is not a logging bill," Feinstein
said. "This legislation would merely allow the brush to
be cleared out." She makes it sound like a weekend clean
up operation, when the reality is more akin to the silvicultural
equivalent of Shock and Awe.
There's no money in clearing brush or
thinning small trees. And let's be clear, the Healthy Forests
Initiative, which should land in the PR Hall of Fame in the category
of most deceptively-titled bills, is all about making money for
timber companies. Feinstein's legislation underwrites the logging
of big trees, many of them in roadless areas far removed from
even the most advanced tentacles of suburban sprawl. In exchange,
she doles out to complacent environmentalists, the Pavlovian
dogs of the political establishment, a few tiny old-growth reserves
as morsels, knowing that they can always be logged later. Hush
puppies, indeed.
So the timber industry didn't have to
break a sweat to achieve their fondest objective. Politicians
from both parties, along with the media, did their work for them.
The public seems to fear fire more than other natural events,
such as earthquakes or tornadoes. Fires seem preventable. People
want to believe there's a political fix and congress is anxious
to feed that illusion.
But the forests and chaparral of southern
California are meant to burn. It's an ecosystem literally born,
reared and shaped by fire. Once or twice every 20 years for the
past 10 millennia these forests and scrublands have been scorched
with fires at least as intense as those which blazed this autumn.
Logging off big (or little) trees won't
alter that ecological reality in the least, except, perhaps,
to exacerbate it. Wildland fires are linked most firmly to periods
of prolonged drought. The longer the drought, the bigger the
fires. Indeed, logging will simply remove from the forest the
hardiest trees, the very ones that have survived previous fires.
In their place will come new logging roads which will open up
tempting new avenues for forests arsonists.
The fires may also come more frequently
because of economic factors. During recessions, arson-sparked
forest fires become more common. At least three of the big California
fires were deliberately set. Firefighting, which is almost useless
in combating forest fires, is big business. And increasingly
it's a corporate business. Under Clinton and Bush, firefighting
has been privatized. That business needs fires in order to prosper,
the bigger the better. A government subsidy is just a match away.
Firefighting and military expenditures are the last remnants
of Keynsian economics thriving in the American system these days.
Congress blindly writes blank checks for both enterprises regardless
of their utility.
Of course, global warming also plays
a role. The West is becoming drier and hotter. In the future,
scrubland and forest fires will become more frequent, more intense
and burn longer than in the past. But don't expect action from
the current crop of politicians on that front either. This congress
is more likely to hand out tax breaks for designer SUVs, than
give a dime to solar energy or raise fuel-efficiency standards.
In the post 9/11 landscape, Bush has made the conspicuous burning
of fossil fuels a patriotic emblem of American manliness.
Simply put: fire can't be excluded from
these ecosystems, but the endless march of subdivisions and mountain
resorts can be halted. (Indeed, wildfires might be thought of
as a naturopathic remedy of sorts, a kind of ecological radiation
treatment for the cancer of urban spraw.) Of course, none of
the politicians on the scene today will entertain notions of
restricting in the least further development into the shrinking
forests, deserts and chaparral of the arid and fire-prone West.
Instead, they try to pacify the developers and homeowners with
the comforting illusion that smart-bomb logging and beefed up
firefighting can keep the inevitable infernos in check. It's
a dangerous delusion that cost 20 lives in the last couple of
weeks and left thousands displaced.
The rich will survive to build again,
bigger and sturdier structures, with irrigated lawns, swimming
pools and tile roofs. The insurance companies will be pressed
by politicians, such as the loathsome Insurance Commissioner
John Garamendi, to pay up in full so that the building trades
can prosper.
But what will become of the poor and
uninsured, the true human victims of these autumn fires? One
early calculation by the Los Angeles Times estimated that 32
percent of the residents evacuated from the southern California
fires were welfare recipients, which means they were impoverished
women and children. How many more were poor men? Elderly? Migrant
workers? The desperate people who tend the homes of Riverside
and Big Bear elite. Where will they end up?
The final victim in all of this is environmental
movement itself. It is clearly defunct at the operational level.
The green establishment vowed that stopping the Healthy Forest
Initiative was their top legislative priority. But their campaign,
which tried to lay all the blame on Bush and his gang of Republican
ultras, was reduced to cinders with those California fires and
the carrion feeders of the Democratic Party. They got creamed
80 to 14, betrayed by legislators, such as Feinstein, Wyden,
Boxer, Murray and Baucus, who they had previously certified as
champions of the green cause. One lonely vote. The child molester
lobby wields more power on the Hill these days.
The big greens can't even go down fighting.
With the blood still wet on the floor from the slaughter in the
senate, a representative from The Wilderness Society told the
Idaho Statesman that the legislation "offers workable solutions
to forest problems, as long as the government follows through
with its promises." There you have it. With one move, the
Wilderness Society yanked the rug from beneath the grassroots
greens and at the same time stamped its imprimatur on logging
as a tool to fight forest fires.
Given a chance, the forests of the San
Bernadinos will recover. The same can't be said for the credibility
of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Weekend Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|