Twenty Years of Crimes Against Democracy

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Twenty Years of Crimes Against Democracy is a compilation of stories, news reports and opinion pieces I wrote on the I69/NAFTA Highway in the Alternative between August 2002 and July 2009. The articles, all of which are available on the Alternative Web site, were not written as a book, so they have been edited and tweaked for consistency and flow. As a former newspaper reporter and Web publisher, for example, my style is to write every piece to stand on its own, emphasizing the latest developments and including whatever background is necessary for our everchanging universe of Twenty Years of Crimes Against Democracy readers to understand the context. So, by their very nature, the articles published here contain some redundancies. I have tried to minimize them, but some remain. And while the articles are presented in the order in which they were published and span the entire history of the I69 boondoggle, they started in 2002 and did not relay the tale in chronological order. Neither did they represent a comprehensive account of every event surrounding the boondoggle, large or small. To help fill those holes, a threepart series of stories from 2003 called "I69: Road to Democratic Ruin," which chronicle the boondoggle's early history, appear out of order as Chapter 2 to provide historical context. Each chapter begins with a short introduction that provides an overview of each year's significant events, some of which I did not write about. And the final chapter provides a comprehensive, illustrated timeline that details the issue's history, development by development, drawn from news reports in the Herald Times, Bloomington Alternative and Associated Press, along with documents from CARR's archives. What follows, I believe, is a true political crime story, the final chapter of which is yet to be written. Will the perpetrators get away with their outrages? Or will they be held accountable?