AUSTIN, Texas -- Throwing around words like "fantastic" and "stupefying" is considered bad form outside the tabloid press. But I'm damned if I know what else to say about the news that the Bush administration has decided that global warming is indeed taking place and they are planning to do exactly nothing about it.

Here we are in the middle of wallowing in this, "What didn't they know and why didn't they know it?" debate -- this maddening, haunting and probably useless exercise in "Why didn't somebody do something?" Sept. 11 left quite a bit of spilt milk on the floor, but even that disaster will pale against the consequences of unchecked global warming. Yet here is the Bush government announcing right here and now that it knows this disaster is coming but it will not do anything to stop it. They will not even do anything to slow it down or soften its impact. What can you call that except fantastically irresponsible?

According to The New York Times, the United States has reported to the United Nations that that global warming will substantially alter our

AUSTIN, Texas -- Those of the populist persuasion are struggling against what is perhaps the most irresistible of all temptations -- the urge to say, "I told you so."

It is raining evidence these days. The newspaper business sections are turning into the Daily Fraud Update. Deloitte & Touche is now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for its role in the unpleasant doings at Adelphia, energy CEOs keep biting the dust -- first at CMS, then at Dynegy -- the Arthur Andersen trial in Houston gets more depressing by the day, and corporate evildoers are suddenly ubiquitous.

OK, I promise that I'm only going to do this once, but ... we did tell you so. Three years ago, I wrote a column explaining why I thought the high-tech market made Las Vegas casinos look good. One reader was so amused by this ludicrous display of ignorance he sent me an enormous flower arrangement -- the thing had to have cost a couple hundred bucks -- saying I'd given him the best laugh he'd had in years. I bring this up because I think it's important to remember the degree of triumphalism that raged among

Todo el tiempo estamos en lucha. -- Mateo Antonio Rendón, manager of FESACORA, the Salvadoran organization of agrarian reform cooperatives

Where does your morning cup of coffee come from? If you can answer that question, you probably already know more about the politics of that beverage than most North Americans who drink it.

El Salvador since the '80s

I traveled to El Salvador in early February with a group of eight other Ohio residents and three Equal Exchange employees to learn how the harvesting and production process worked. Equal Exchange is a 40-employee worker-owned fair trade coffee company in the Boston area that buys directly from democratically-run farmer cooperatives in Latin America and other coffee-producing regions.

Four members of our group were coffee and wine buyers for Heinen's, a family-owned Cleveland supermarket chain with 13 stores; other Cleveland participants were owner Jeff Heinen, two teachers who had won a shoppers' essay contest, and an activist who helped sell Equal Exchange coffee at Heinen's and other local stores. This was the first trip EE had sponsored

Parable No. 1: The Propane Valve Crisis

In California and other states across this great nation, we have been confronting deadlines on new propane bottle valves. I speak of the mostly 5-gallon propane gas bottles soon to be seen in trailer parks, on RV's, Webber BBQ's, boats, back porches and street kitchens. You name it, and there's probably a 5-gallon propane bottle around somewhere.

I recently came across a vivid illustration of the passion aroused by this crisis in Butte County, in the Chico area of Northern California. The local propane distributor told my host, Jeff Howell, that he 'd been physically attacked twice in the past four weeks by angered denizens of trailer parks.

Why was he attacked?

The answer can be traced to the run-up in propane gas prices in recent years, which has prompted more and more small stores like 7/11 to sell propane. The inexperienced propane dispenser simply fills the bottle till clouds of propane inform the dispenser that it's time to stop. The overfilled propane bottle is taken to the back porch, where, perhaps, it

Right in the wake of House Majority leader Dick Armey's explicit call for two million Palestinians to be booted out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Gaza as well, came yet one more of those earnest articles accusing a vague entity called "the left" of anti-Semitism. This one was in Salon, by a man called Dennis Fox, identified as an associate professor of legal studies and psychology at the University of Illinois. Salon titled Fox's contribution, "The shame of the pro-Palestinian left: Ignorance and anti-Semitism are undercutting the moral legitimacy of Israel's critics."

Over the past 20 years, I've learned there's a quick way of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There's a brisk uptick in the number of articles here by Jews accusing the left of anti-Semitism. These articles adopt varying strategies, but the most obvious one is that nowhere in them is there much sign that the author feels it necessary to concede that Israel is a racist state whose obvious and provable intent is to continue to steal Palestinian land, oppress Palestinians, herd them into smaller and smaller enclaves, and in all likelihood ultimately drive them