READING I.F. STONE ON EARTH DAY: WHY WE STILL WON’T GET ANYWHERE UNLESS WE CONNECT THE DOTS
One week ago, I was honoured to receive an “Izzy Award” for “outstanding achievement in independent media and journalism.” The annual award, which this year also went to David Sirota for his groundbreaking investigations into political corruption in the U.S. pension system, is named after the great muckraker I.F. Stone (“Izzy” to his friends).
In past years, the award has gone to people who do a far better job of embodying the legacy of Stone’s investigative reporting than I (Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill among them). But as I said at the ceremony at Ithaca College, I doubt the judges have given the honour to anyone whose grandparents would have been more thrilled. Without fail, my late grandfather Philip Klein would read I.F. 
Stone’s Weekly to my late grandmother Annie while she knitted some new creation.
In preparation for the ceremony, I read some of Stone’s environmental writing, and came across a piece that seems very worth sharing today. It’s the speech he gave on April 22, 1970—the very first Earth Day. Never one to mince words, Stone’s speech was titled “Con Games.”
Picture the scene: it’s the Sylvan Theater on the grounds of the National Monument in Washington, D.C. Millions have participated in Earth Day events across the country and thousands are now gathered on the National Mall to listen to music (including Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs) and hear rally speeches from political heavyweights.
It is in this joyous and self-congratulatory atmosphere that a curmudgeonly I.F. Stone, by now a full-fledged icon on the left, takes the stage. And he unapologetically rains on the parade, accusing Earth Day of providing cover for escalating war and calling for a movement willing to demand “enormous changes—psychological, military, and bureaucratic—to end the existing world system, a system of hatred, of anarchy, of murder, of war and pollution.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
