CWI loses Dáil seat

The CWI's Joe Higgins lost about a fifth of his 2002 vote and missed getting reelected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) today.

I heard him speak a couple of years ago at a PSOL rally at the World Social Forum. He really epitomized the characteristic anglophone CWI speaking style, which is to say that he was boring, kept bragging about the CWI's dubious achievements and went on for about twice as long as he was supposed to. I'm surprised he managed to hold on to his seat as long as he did.

Blowback in Lebanon

You know Fateh al-Islam, the nasty al-Qaeda (or are they pro-Syrian?) Palestinians (or are they Ethiopians, or Pakistanis, or who-knows-what?) who are giving the Lebanese army such a hard time right now?

Here's what Seymour Hersh wrote about them back in March:
I originally found this on Lenin's Tomb, a fine blog run by a guy from the British SWP.

Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous.” Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. “I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah,” Crooke said.

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A few days ago I was noticing a lot of reports claiming that many of the members of Fateh al-Islam were non-Arabs, the implication being that they had been recruited abroad. One thing that I noticed visiting Sabra, Shatila and Bourj al-Barajneh camps in Beirut (and which I haven't heard mention of so far) is that there a lot of non-Palestinians living there. Most are migrant workers from Syria, but there are also Iraqi refugees and others, and I wouldn't be surprised if the supposed Somali mujahideen or what not were actually people who were recruited at the camp.
Samidoun (Steadfast) was a network of activist groups and NGOs that worked to help displaced people in and around Beirut during and after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon last summer. I did some web stuff for them while I was there.

I found out about the relief effort from MarxistFromLebanon, who was also part of Samidoun.

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I also see that there is a grassroots relief effort, on the same lines as Samidoun and involving many of the same people. There is info on their blog, including where to send donations.

Photos from West Virginia

I just got back from Coal River Road in West Virginia. I was taking pictures for my friend Anand Gopal of Leftwords, who's doing a story for Wiretap Magazine on the mining communities out there. It was a fascinating trip and I want to write a bit more about it, but I'm moving house today so I'll content myself with putting up a couple of pictures.



This is Marsh Fork Elementary School, with a coal silo towering over it in the background. We got started because Anand heard from some folks in Philly about this spot. A lot of kids here have been getting sick, either from the coal dust or from the chemicals the company uses to treat the coal. Out of view in the background is 2.8 billion gallons of water full of mine waste, held back by a leaky dam.



This is Anand with Larry Gibson, a local activist, in Kayford, WV. Larry is pointing out a fissure opened up by explosives used in mountaintop removal mining. The mountain we're standing on top of is honeycombed with old mineshafts which are also full of wastewater; a fissure in the right place could flood the valleys and displace thousands of people.



This is what mountaintop removal looks like: the Samples mine in Kayford. The peak of this mountain used to be 700 feet above where we are standing. Towards the right you can see some of the attempts at restoration - native species don't grow back well on the fill from MTR, so they use imported grasses as a covering. You don't get a good sense of the scale from this picture, but if you look at it at full resolution you can just barely see the dumptrucks they use to pour the rock over the side of the mountain; they have tires the size of an SUV. It's also pretty impressive in Google Maps. Google Earth has a recent picture superimposed on out-of-date topographic information, which helps give a sense of how much the area has changed.



This is the memorial to 12 miners who died after being trapped by an explosion in Sago last year. The company had been cutting corners on safety, and locals say they held back a team that was ready to go in and cut these guys out. Mine safety has deteriorated tremendously with the expansion of aggressively nonunion companies like Massey Coal, who also push mountaintop removal.

Hangovers from 2000

I'm only even writing this post because Kim Stanley Robinson has written the best political scifi out there. His best known works are Red Mars and its sequels, which played a big role in my getting political. Plenty of his other works are, if anything, even better. The Three Californias Trilogy (reprinted not long ago) and Years of Rice and Salt are absolutely astonishing, as are some of his less remembered works, like Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness. He's written a lot of clangers, though.
I've just picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below (the middle of a trilogy on climate change) again after a break. It has some good parts, but on the whole it's probably his worst book so far. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I'm particularly struck by the asinine politics.

A good deal of it centers around a miracle democratic presidential candidate, Phil Chase, who likes to talk about getting along with the rest of the world, pays attention to what scientists say about global warming and so on; in spite of that, he feels so threatened by a hypothetical independent 'scientific' candidate "polling about five percent in the blue states" in spite of not being on the ballot or even actually existing that the protagonists feel obliged to have it 'withdraw' from the race.

It's one of the best examples of the really bizarre reactions a lot of folks on the left are still having to the 2000 election. Robinson, who is pretty sharp politically, seems to have been so traumatized that he thinks that even an imaginary third party candidate - that is, even the idea that we might be able to do better than what's on the official menu - needs a sort of ritual exorcism.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that real democratic nominees are nowhere near as attractive as Phil Chase, but that every four years millions of people try to convince themselves that they are. Before Al Gore reinvented himself last year as a born-again environmentalist, he had worked hard to kneecap the Kyoto protocol - something that I think a lot of Nader voters knew or suspected in 2000.

This is part of the reason that, in spite of some reservations, I'm still glad I campaigned for Nader in 2000 and voted for him in 2004. There is a big problem with the political culture in the US, and one small but important part of it is that so many of the people who should be trying to do something about it are too pessimistic to even think seriously about it.

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Incidentally, there was an excellent piece by Garret Keizer in this month's Harper's to do with Al Gore and the politics of global warming. Among the many interesting points, he suggested that global warming could be a good counterpart to the "war on terror" in keeping people from thinking about everything else that's going on. That's an interesting way of looking at what's happened to Robinson.