Laura Flanders | The Nation

Haven’t read Lee Fang’s excellent expose on the lobbyists controlling the Presidential Debate Committee? You should. Then imagine what these debates would be like if things were very different. For one thing, there might be more parties’ candidates included.

Thanks to Democracy Now!, Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party have been able to take part in three virtually expanded debates. On no occasion was the contrast greater than in the foreign policy debate Tuesday night. While the word clouds over the Obama/Romney debate screamed “crippling, kill, world leader, Israel,” the debate over at Democracy Now! kept coming back to international law, climate change, morality and human rights.

Take the first segment. To Bob Schieffer’s question about Libya, terrorism and US policy in the Middle East, Mitt Romney applauded the president: “We’re going to have to recognize that we have to do as the president has done.” The president appreciated the recognition. “I’m glad that you agree that we have been successful in going after Al Qaeda.”

Fed up with political ads? You might still like this one. Timely, from the Agenda Project Fund, this ad features twenty-eight women asking politicians: If you don’t trust me with my body, why should I trust you with my country? Good question.

For more on the power of women voters in this election, check out Bryce Covert on Mitt Romney's flip-flopping on equal pay and reproductive rights. And sign up for Feminist Roundup, The Nation's weekly newsletter featuring feminist content, here.

“The old economy is not coming back. We’ve got to build a new one.” That’s what Bill Clinton told the Democratic National Convention last month. But Clinton, with his signing of NAFTA and repeal of Glass-Steagall, bears much responsibility for speeding that economy’s dive off a deregulated cliff.

Indeed, Clinton is a good argument for not leaving the building of any “new economy” to American presidents. Still, those who are experimenting right now with new models for production based on new relationships to labor, communities and the planet won’t be able to change the economic playing-field without meaningful help from government.

Instead of looking to the same old economic strategies and players—very large corporations—to get us out of the mess they helped create, government needs to “act different,” David Levine of the American Sustainable Business Council told me this summer: “What we need now is not just more talk about supporting small businesses, but new principles and new, transparent rules applied to big and small alike.”

Larry Gibson, the West Virginia activist who built a movement from his will to save a mountain, died Sunday from a heart attack while working on his home. He was 66 years old and had become the face of the fight against mountaintop removal. Gibson makes one of his last appearances in Chris Hedges’s and Joe Sacco’s new book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. He toured Hedges and Sacco around his community and described what’s happened to the land:

“Living here as a boy I wasn’t any different than anybody else,” he said. “I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world, with nature. I could walk through the forest. I could hear the animals. I could hear the woods talk to me. Everywhere I looked there was life.… Now there is no life there. Only dust.”

When Gibson moved back to his family home on Kayford Mountain after being forced into retirement at General Motors, mountaintop removal was just gearing up. Thirty years later, 500 mountains across West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky have been stripped of trees and flattened. The constant explosions in one typical week in West Virginia, report Hedges and Sacco, equal the cumulative power of the blast over Hiroshima. The human toll from coal—from the emissions of dust, not to mention working in the mines—stands at 24,000 people a year lost to coal related diseases. Gibson told Hedges and Sacco: “That’s eight times bigger than the World Trade Center. Nobody say anything about that… Coal kills, everybody knows coal kills. But, you know, profit.”