The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

The coffee tastes more than a little bitter this morning. It is no sweet tea to see your worst political predictions come true.

I have been railing for the past five and a half years about the need for a coalition to come together to fight the complete corporate takeover of the American political system. Many people got off the couch and fought for the election of Barack Obama in 2008. It was a great victory and there is no doubt he is a better president than George W. Bush and certainly better than anything we could have hoped for from John McCain or Sarah Palin.

But thanks in part to the tea party morons, that election looks like one step forward, two steps back. Give me the Coffee Party any day.

In order to appease the incoming Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and to show he can broker a bi-partisan deal after all, Obama caved to the GOP without a fight and backed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans for two more years, breaking yet another campaign promise to make his deal with the red state devils.

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Skeptics Raise Questions

by Glynn Wilson

You will be glad to find out today that perhaps your favorite brand of toilet paper may no longer come from wood harvested out of some of the South’s more important hardwood forests. But the deal that led to that agreement raises some interesting economic and political questions that are not being explored either by the non-profit groups which forged the deal — or the mainstream media covering it. Let’s connect some dots and raise some healthy, democratic skepticism.

Three non-profit environmental organizations are basking in the glow of victory this week and heaping massive praise on the Georgia-Pacific paper company, for establishing a policy not to purchase trees from so-called “Endangered Forests” or from new pine plantations established where natural hardwood forests once stood. The policy statement was developed in consultation with the Dogwood Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rainforest Action Network.

The NRDC press release hails the agreement as a “bold commitment to forests,” and the Dogwood Alliance praises the “iconic Southern paper giant” for “announcing bold new steps … to prevent the conversion of (more than) 90 million acres of natural hardwood forests to pine plantations and protect endangered forests in the Southern U.S. –- the largest wood and paper producing region of the world. History is in the making. Times are changing. A major economic force affecting forests has shifted.”

While the new forest policy applies to all of its operations, according to the agreement, it is just a “first step” in implementing the company’s commitment to working with environmental groups and scientists “to identify 11 Endangered Forests and Special Areas totaling 600,000 acres in the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Eco-Region, as well as 90 million acres of natural hardwood forests in the Southern region.”

“No other U.S. company has demonstrated this level of initiative in mapping unique forests across such a broad region,” said Debbie Hammel, the senior resource specialist with NRDC. “Through this process, GP has proven that — by harnessing scientific advances and seeking conservation guidance — corporations can help protect unique places without sacrificing profitability.”

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“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
- Benjamin Franklin

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
- Paul Newman as Luke, in Cool Hand Luke

“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
- John Muir

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

LITTLE RIVER CANYON – Sitting as quietly and patently as could be expected on such a quick, short trip to the mountain waterfalls around Mentone, Alabama over the weekend, I gazed until I knew the sun would soon disappear from view behind the treetops at one of the Littler River Falls overlooks.

In this preserved idyllic setting, I thought about my Cherokee ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years before the United States of America was a gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye. I thought of the men who killed the Cherokee too, and connected the dots in my mind to understand the modern descendants of those killers.

Is it possible that a grudge could linger from a human gene, and not just pass down from one generation to another through the culture?

I thought about the social and political problems in the world today, chiefly focusing on this country — and my native state.

There in that muted fall beauty, as muddled as the world has become today, my thoughts also turned to the Scotsman John Muir, an early American botanist, one of the first American naturalists and nature writers to roam from the hills of Scotland to New England, through Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately California by way of South America.

Glynn Wilson

Click on the image for a larger view…

Muir never saw this exact spot, and for that he missed one. But he passed through these mountains on the Georgia side as surely as DeSoto. (See map below).

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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

The news could not be any worse.

I honestly wish there was some good news to report. Sorry to say, there’s not any.

Well, the Crimson Tide did manage to pull out a victory over Ole Miss in Tuscaloosa on Saturday, football being about the only thing worth mentioning on the good side of the ledger in Alabama. But the Atlanta Braves were knocked out of post-season play last week, so baseball season is over. So much for sports.

I traveled to the Gulf Coast again last week for Shrimp Fest, hoping upon hope to see some signs of things getting better along the formerly beautiful Gulf of Mexico. I’ve spent a fair portion of my life visiting the Gulf, and lived in Gulf Shores and New Orleans for some very interesting runs over the years.

Alas, I came away with empirical data indicating that the air and water are still dangerous and may not get well anytime soon.

On the political front, the elections of 2010 are shaping up to be compared to Richard Nixon’s midterm elections in 1970 and his reelection campaign in 1972, when corporate and individual donations were secretly pouring in to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, otherwise known as CREEP.

Nixon said he was “not a crook,” but he was certainly a creep. No historical rehabilitation will ever exonerate him for that.

The record of all that illegal Republican campaign cash was stored in the president’s secretary’s desk, and is now in the National Archives and referred to as “Rose Mary’s baby.” Unfortunately, the Washington Post‘s investigation of the Watergate break in did not pick up enough steam to stop Nixon’s reelection, even though it did culminate in his impeachment and resignation after the election — and jail time for some of his cronies.

Is it possible that a similar scenario is developing this time around?

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The Federal Government or the State Court System?

David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club protests BP in Panama City, Florida

Legal Analysis
by Glynn Wilson

David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club, who recently protested a public forum sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior by wearing duct tape over his mouth since citizens were not allowed to speak like they should have been in a real democratic town hall public hearing, was also party to a stakeholders meeting August 17 with officials from national and local government agencies and environmental groups as well as the British Petroleum corporation.

There were already so many public complaints about the lethargic nature of BP’s response to paying claims to individuals and businesses along the Gulf Coast that the Obama administration stepped in June 15 and seized $20 billion of the oil company’s money, to make sure people receive compensation for losses suffered due to the largest and worst environmental disaster in American history.

By June 16, less than two months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico April 20, killing 11 workers and spreading it’s crude all over the Gulf from the Louisiana marshes to the beaches of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, President Barack Obama appointed Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg to act as the arbitrator to lead an independent team to oversee paying out claims from the new $20 billion escrow fund.

But the question on Underhill’s mind at the August 17 meeting was whether Feinberg could truly be independent and fair if he is being paid by BP. So he tried to get an answer from one of the BP representatives at the meeting, Gary Willis. Clearly there is not much trust of BP on the Gulf Coast, since the company has lied time and time again about the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf, about the use of chemical dispersants, even about who has the power to control access to oiled beaches.

The answer Underhill got from the BP official was “fuzzy,” he said, so he and Casi Callaway of the Mobile Baykeeper did a followup interview with BP public relations representative Sam J. Sacco.

In an e-mail exchange obtained exclusively by The Locust Fork News-Journal, Sacco said: “A question was asked by one of your members at the Aug. 17 COAST meeting as to whether BP was paying the appointed claims administrator, Mr. Feinberg,” Sacco said. “The answer to that question is yes.”

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You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
- English proverb

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
- Mark Twain

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

For the record, I’ve never owned a horse.

I’ve ridden a few, but I still don’t know for sure if this proverb is true.

Although I suspect when John Heywood used the phrase in 1546 he was talking more about people than horses.

You think?

As for Mark Twain’s quote, I agree 100 percent.

My humble sympathies go out to the citizens of the world, the country and the Gulf Coast today, however. I’ve lived on the coast of Alabama and loved it, and in New Orleans, and I feel you. I do.

But I know how hard it is sometimes to actually spend time reading up on a subject before bloviating about it.

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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.

Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”

On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.

Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.

I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.

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Five Years Ago Today, this Web Press was Born to Counter the Fourth Estate

Brooks Boliek

The Boliek house in Takoma Park, Maryland, where this site was started five years ago today…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

THE BUNKER – Five years ago today, I huddled in front of a little apple red iMac computer in a friend’s kitchen in Tacoma Park, Maryland, near Silver Spring. It was there I wrote the very first Sunday column for this alternative, independent news Web site, there in the pouring rain with the jazz down low on the radio.

By that time, George W. Bush had been sworn in for a second term, so we knew he would be with us for another three and a half years. There was not much hope for stopping all the damage he would surely cause in that time, but somebody had to try to warn the public.

There was always the hope of impeachment.

That story never did grow legs, or at least not long enough to ever be considered a real threat to the corporate state pulling Bush’s strings.

As the rain poured with the jazz in the background, I read about the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, and thought of my good friend Spider Martin, who had given up the ghost two years before, also by self-inflicted gunshot wound.

You’ve just about got to be a big picture kind of writer to make sense of moments like that — in an hour or two of reading, thinking and writing. That’s about how long it takes to produce an average newspaper-style column of about a thousand words.

The problem was, everywhere you looked over the Internets on the World Wide Web at that time, there were these things called “blogs” popping up all over the place like mushrooms in a cow pasture after a summer rain.

In the face of that kind of fast-paced change, what was an experienced, real journalist to do in these times, five years after the heralded advent of the new millennium?

There was all this anonymous defamation on some sites; on others, it was mostly self-congratulatory navel-gazing, like reality TV. Ugh!

Could the Free Press and American Democracy survive both Bush — and blogs?

Gawd only knew.

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Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Former New York Times editor and Alabama native Howell Raines popped out of his Pocono Mountains retirement this week to take on Fox News in the editorial section of the Washington Post.

His point was that newspaper reporters should take on Fox News for the biased way the cable network has covered the health care reform debate.

“Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?” Raines asks.

Everything he says is true. It’s just that it comes a bit late in the game, long after Raines himself was in a position to do something about the kind of bad, corporate journalism that was already developing while he was still in it full time.

Some of us on the Web Press have been calling Fox biased and wrong for years.

Where was Raines in this fight when he ran the New York Times as executive editor in 2002 and 2003?

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