Nature really kicks the door down once in a while and lets us know how humans have made a mess of things. A few years ago, Hurricane Mitch laid waste much of Guatemala and neighboring countries. The hills crumbled and topsoil sluiced into the sea. There were politics, class politics, in that sluicing, same way there's politics in most "natural" disasters. The United States had crushed land reform in Guatemala in the 1950s, with the CIA overseeing a coup against Arbenz and launching decades of savage repression. The peasants had to surrender the good flat land to the United Fruit Co. and scratch small holdings for subsistence into ever steeper hillsides, which in consequence got more and more eroded. Then came Mitch, and the hillsides and the small plots were washed away.

Hurricane Katrina . the aftermath is payback time for decades of stupidity, greed, pillage and racism. My thought is that the tempo toward catastrophe really picked up in the Reagan era. That's when the notion of this society being in some deep sense a collective effort, pointed toward universal human betterment -- the core of the old Enlightenment -- went onto the trash heap.

Three years ago, the American Civil Liberties Union won a significant legal victory when a federal district court ruled that the state must follow strict due-process guidelines before sending prisoners to Ohio's only supermaximum-security in Youngstown. The number of inmates at the Ohio State Penitentiary dropped dramatically after a court-ordered review of individual cases determined that two-thirds of the prisoners did not meet the criteria for such restrictive confinement. "The supermax was built to hold 504 prisoners," reported Staughton Lynd, the ACLU's counsel on the case. "There are now roughly 250. So, you can say we've very nearly cut the population in half."

The future of Ohio's only supermaximum-security prison may hinge upon a related hearing's outcome.

In an Aug. 31-Sept. 2 hearing before U.S. District Judge James Gwin in Cleveland, the ACLU attempted to block a recent state proposal to move Ohio's death-row from Mansfield to Youngstown. The ACLU has argued that the wholesale transfer of approximately 190 death-row prisoners violates the concept of individualized hearings. The Berkeley Wright Institute

The trillion dollar question has long been: How do we get the major media outlets in this country to notice that the White House is run by oil barons who launch illegal wars based on lies, defund everything else, and destroy the environment at every opportunity – and that this is a single, connected story?

In June we garnered a bit of interest in the Downing Street Memos story, which then dried up and went away.  Then there was the Karl Rove scandal, which dried up and went away.  It's not that the actual events went away.  More evidence continued to come out, protests continued to grow, congressional action by progressive Dems and brave Republicans accelerated.  But the media lost interest.

Next came the Cindy Sheehan story.  This one was such a big splash that the media announced the birth of an anti-war movement (which was born simply because the media had, after all these years, decided to acknowledge its existence – at least briefly).  And now we have the Katrina story.