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July 9, 2002
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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July
8, 2002
All Roads Lead
to Yucca Mountain
The Atomic Clock is Ticking
by Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
It's a rare day when you see these guys sweat,
but the nuclear industry is getting frantic. You can tell by
the desperate nature of their recent campaign to push through
the senate their plan to ship the nation's commercial nuclear
waste to Yucca Mountain outside Las Vegas.
When Bush came to power, the nuke lobby
thought they had it made. The days of competition between the
oil industry and the nuclear lobby are long gone. Now they all
belong to the same conglomerate. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham,
perhaps only member of the cabinet who requires a more simplified
briefing book than Bush, was an old pal, long bought and sold.
Bush himself called for more subsidies to nuclear power and reversed
his election-eve opposition to the nuke industry's most fervent
aspiration: the Yucca Mountain dump.
But 9/11 changed all that. Not immediately,
mind you. But as the patriotic hysteria, in which it was deemed
un-American to question any Bush proposal, began to recede, people
began to conclude that the scheme to truck 77,000 tons of radioactive
waste their communities wasn't the brightest idea. Maps of the
possible transport routes show that more than 50 million Americans
live within one-mile of these nuclear corridors.
Even the rosiest scenario painted by
the Department of Energy admits that at least 48 people will
die from cancers associated with the passage of these radioactive
boxcars. Naturally, that figure doesn't take into account the
toll that might result from an act of sabotage or, more likely,
a simple train derailment or jack-knifed tractor-trailer truck
that sends highly-radioactive waste spilling into rivers, lakes
and neighborhoods.
So the nuclear industry had to act fast.
It deployed a legion of K Street lobbyists, many with ties to
both the Bush administration and big time Democrats, and some
of the nation's most craven PR firms to clear the way.
The latest recruit to the nuke team is
the US Chamber of Commerce which has beamed a wave of wildly
misleading radio ads across the country aimed at securing senate
passage of the Yucca Mountain bill. A vote is expected in the
next week or two.
The Chamber's ads are little more than
focus group tested scare tactics. The ads claim that the Yucca
Mountain plan, which enviros have shrewdly dubbed Mobile Chernobyl,
is actually a "way to get nuclear waste out of your communities."
This is in reference to the nuclear waste now being stored at
commercial reactors. Of course, the waste will continue to pile
up at those sites as long as the plants operate-and for years
after they are mothballed. In fact, all nuclear waste must "cool"
for at least five years before they can even consider shipping
off somewhere.
Only under the Yucca Mountain bail-out
plan, the lethal waste will go transcontinental, rolling through
44 states, plus the District Columbia, passing through communities
now far removed from nuclear plants and through states that have
decided to reject nuclear power.
The ads also try to calm the public nerve
by suggesting that once entombed in the bowels of Yucca Mountain
the nuclear waste will be safely contained for all time-or at
least 10,000 years. Of course, the Chamber delicately sidesteps
the very real question as to whether or not Yucca Mountain isn't
in fact a kind of geological sieve. The disposal site sits above
of an aquifer that is becoming more and more important as a source
of drinking water for the ever-expanding Las Vegas metro area.
Even the DOE's own geological investigations reveal that the
earthquake prone nature of the Yucca Mountain site may creature
fissures in the earth that will allow the waste to seep into
the underground reservoir.
There are signs that the public is beginning
to awaken from the near catatonic state it has slumbered in sense
the 9/11 attacks. The collapse of the stock market, the insider
trading scandals, the looting of 401-Ks, mounting lay-offs, the
gruesome failures of the Bush war machine, Ashcroft's assault
on the constitution, the lack of an even-handed plan for Middle
East peacethe list of troubles grows daily. With the Yucca Mountain
vote approaching any day, there's a chance to strike back and
begin to set things right.
All it would take to defeat the nuclear
lobby, and give the Bush administration a deserved black eye,
is for a handful of senators to launch and sustain a filibuster.
In the past, Democrats have rushed to the nuclear industry's
rescue. An April 28th survey by the Las Vegas Review showed that
11 Democratic senators supported the project, including such
luminaries as John Edwards, Patty Murray and Ernest Hollings.
Others said were undecided, including Paul Wellstone. Now's the
time to see if the likes of Wellstone, the self-professed savoir
of progressive causes, really have the courage and the skill
to monkeywrench the system. The atomic clock is ticking.
Today's
Features
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
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