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Today's
Stories
April 28
/ 29, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
Is
Global Warming a Sin?
April 27,
2007
Eva Liddell
How
Can Women Defend Themselves Against Stalkers?
Phyllis Bennis
and Robert Jensen
Moving Beyond Anti-War Politics
Mike Whitney
Where's the Beef?: Padilla and the Zucchini Prosecution
Michael F.
Brown
Biden and Pelosi: Failing to Hold Israel Accountable for War
Crimes in Lebanon
Jordan Flaherty
Forgotten Mississippi
Margaret Kimberly
John McCain, Cold-Blooded Senator
Christopher Brauchli
The Dangers of Unstable People
Jacob Mundy
Stalemate in the Western Sahara?
Website of the Day
Yee Speaks
April 26, 2007
Andrew Cockburn
Wolfowitz's
War
Franklin Lamb
Giuliani
Plays the Islamic Terror Card
Patrick Cockburn
Al-Qa'ida Group Behind US Deaths in Iraq
Roger Morris
Dispatches From the Front
Henry Siegman
The Three Nos of Jerusalem
Alevtina Rea
A Sister City Debate in Rachel Corrie's Hometown
Paris
Are You a Hip Hop Apologist?
Nikolas Kozloff
White Racism and the Aymara in Bolivia
Alan Farago
Dow 13,000 Disconnect
Matthew S. Miller
The Limits to Lakoff
Website of
the Day
PBS: Blaming Blacks Again
April 25, 2007
Sharon Smith
The
Rights of Children in America
David Price
The Long Lost War
Diana Johnstone
Who Wants Sarko? New or Old France?
Brendan Cooney
Cho and Cheney: Killer Looks
Sonja Karkar
Israeli Democracy, For Jews Only?
Brian Concannon
Wolfowitz and Haiti
Lee Gaillard
Baptism Under Fire: Can the Osprey Fly?
Leah Fishbein
Women Under Siege
Dave Lindorff
The First Shoe Drops
Neal Galloway
US Agricultural Policy is Destructive at Home and Abroad
Website of the Day
Anti-War Student Movements: a Short History
April 24,
2007
Ishmael Reed
How
Imus' Media Collaborators Almost Rescued Their Chief
Lila Rajiva
Tragedy and Irony After Virginia Tech
Paul Craig Roberts
The War Goes Ever On
Patrick Cockburn
Sunnis Protest Baghdad's "Prison Wall"
Ralph Nader
The Corporate Debasement of Earth Day
Mike Whitney
Housing Bubble Boondoggle
Website of the Day
"Refugees"
April 23,
2007
Saul Landau
The
Courage to Withdraw
Patrick Cockburn
Time of the Death Squads: Iraq as Revenge Tragedy
Robert Fantina
Changing Sentiments
Sam Husseini
The Gonzales Distraction
Corporate Crime Reporter
Bought-and-Paid-For Journalism at the Philly Inquirer
Elizabeth Lalasz
Sick and Getting Sicker
Harvey Wasserman
Earth Day, Incorporated
Dave Lindorff
Huge Win for Impeachment in Vermont: Are You Listening Sen. Leahy?
Gary Leupp
Maoist Homophobia in Nepal?
Stephen Lendman
A Short History of the Christian Right
Website of the Day
No to OLF
April 21 / 22, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
Bring
Back the Posse
Fred Gardner
Prozac
Madness
Kristoffer Larsson
The Islamic Threat to Europe: By the Numbers
Barbara Rose
Johnston
Nuclear War and Its Consequences
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Heart of Whiteness: Racism, Wealth and IQ
John Scagliotti
Unlocking Closets, Locking Free Speech
Marjorie Cohn
Gonzo Justice: Counting on Alberto
Patrick Cockburn
Sadr Raises the Stakes
Diana Johnstone
The Absent Middle East
Ron Jacobs
Explaining the Spectre
Evelyn Pringle
How Iraq Was Looted
BANCO
Travesties of Justice in a Black City in Michigan: the Persecution
of Rev. Pinkney
Paul Richards
Thinking Big in the Northern Rockies
Dan Bacher
Zapatistas in the Colorado River Delta
Ben Terrall
Showdown at Chevron: SF Protest Against New Iraq Oil Law
Sherwood Ross
How the Taliban Defeated the Pakistani Army in Waziristan
Remi Kanazi
Bill Maher's "Towel-Headed Hos"
Aseem Shrivastava
Behind the Curtain of SEZs
Poets' Basement
Valentine, Reed, Harley and Engel
Website of
the Day
Reading Sappho in New Orleans
April 20,
2007
Doug Peacock
Beginning
of the End for the Yellowstone Grizzly?
Diane Farsetta
Onward, Free Market Soldiers!: Privatizing Public Diplomacy
Tom Clifford
The Surge in Iraqi Civilian Deaths: the Bloodiest 12 Months of
the War
Amira Hass
The
Holocaust as Political Asset
Nicole Colson
Desperation in Gitmo's Camp 6
Sonja Karkar
Double Jeopardy Entraps Palestinians
Heather Gray
The Supreme Court Looks a Lot Like the Taliban
Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban
Syrian Expeditions
Agustin Velloso
Spain and Iraq, Four Years On
Matthew Koehler
Distorting the News in a Timber Company Town
Website of
the Day
Gonzo's Monica
April 19,
2007
Emad Mekay
/
Jim Lobe
Scoring
at the World Bank: Wolfowitz's Quid Pro Quo
Patrick Cockburn
A
Day of Bombs and Blood in Baghdad
Larry C. Johnson
The Hobbesian Hell of Iraq: How Many Dead Equal a Failed Government?
Norman Solomon
Bowing Down to Our Own Violence
Saul Williams
Notes from a Hip Hop Head: an Open Letter to Oprah Winfrey
Sunsara Taylor
From Iraq to the Supreme Court: a New Dark Ages for Women
Harvey Wasserman
How Green is Tom Friedman?
Christopher
Brauchli
Apologies, Incorporated
Anthony Papa
Nightmare Behind Bars: John Valverde's Fight for Freedom
Dave Lindorff
Betraying Thomas Jefferson
Website of the Day
The Best Antiwar Song of the Iraq War?
April 18,
2007
Lila Rajiva
More
Gun Laws or Fewer Idiots? How the Va Tech Administration Failed
Its Campus
Landau / Hassen
Tancredo
as 17th Century Indian Chief?
Charles Fisher
/
Randy Fisher
Don Imus's Firing and the Hip-Hop Culture
Diane Christian
Facing Death Politically
Kevin Prosen
Meeting the Resistance in Iraq
China Hand
Gold Digging: The U.S. Treasury Department's Economic Campaign
Against North Korea
Peter Rost,
MD
The Strange Profits from a Re-Branded Cancer Drug
Justin Akers Chacón
What's Inside the STRIVE Bill
Jerry Kroth
Virginia Tech and Cho Seung Hui: Love and Unhappiness in an Alien
Culture
Sherwood Ross
Massacre at Va Tech: a Brief Glimpse into Daily Life in Iraq
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Bonfire of the Hannities
Alice Cherbonnier
Why South Dakota's "Informed Consent" Law Doesn't Go
Far Enough
Website of
the Year?
"I Hope I Die Before I Get Old"
April 17,
2007
Jean Bricmont
/
Diana Johnstone
The
Elections in France: a Coming Political Tsunami
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bloodbath
in Blacksburg
Frida Berrigan
Militarizing the Border
Alison Weir
The Message of PBS's "Crossroads" Series: Some Muslims
Aren't Bad
John Walsh
Why is the Peace Movement Silent About AIPAC?
Jason Hribal
Resistance is Futile: Emily the Cow and Tyke the Elephant
Evelyn Pringle
The Iraq Money Trail
Ben Terrall
Cuban Exiles Get Hero's Welcome; Haitian Refugees Get Shafted
Stan Cox
1040s and Death Certificates
Soren Ambrose
Confidence
Crisis at the IMF
Website of the Day
Go Ahead and Yell: "FIRE!"
April 16,
2007
John F. Sugg
Hate
and Hypocrisy in the Cox Empire
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Escalating
Military Spending: Income Redistribution in Disguise
Carl G. Estabrook
The Politics of the Useful Threat: It Didn't Start with the Neo-Cons
Paul Craig Roberts
The Party of Brownshirts
Uri Avnery
Blood on Our Hands
Ralph Nader
Where Are the Cries of Outrage Over Military Rapes?
Eamon McCann
Shame of the Empire: Simon, Sir Bono and Tinkerbelle
Lee Sustar
Decoding the Democrats
Mike Whitney
Trouble in Squanderville: Bubble People and the Faith-Based Market
Don Fitz
Solar Capitalism?
Stephen Lendman
Ecuador Votes for Revolutionary Change
Website of the Day
Black Mesa Water Coalition
April 14
/ 15, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
Ho
Industry Whores
Jorge Mariscal
Gen.
Petraeus's Field Manual: a Traveler's Guide to Big Muddy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Beautiful and the Dammed: How the West Got Flooded
Dave Marsh
The
Imus Affair, Hip Hop and Politics
Dr. Trudy Bond
Shrinks, Lies and Torture: How Psychologists Became the Pentagon's
Bitches
Joe Bageant
A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard
Fidel Castro
The Terrorist Walks
Alfredo Molano
"More Than Complicated"
Alan Farago
When Miami Crashes
Michael Neumann
Anglophone Fantasies and French Realities
Fred Gardner
Barbara McNair's Unsung Heroism: Bringing Down the Owner of EST
Ron Jacobs
A Conversation with Three Iraq Veterans Against the War
Gail Dines
Racy Sex, Sexy Racism
Linda Ford
Imus and Lady Hoopsters: a Long History of Bias Against Women
Athletes
Missy Beattie
What Would Imus Do?: Iraq, Ho, Ho, Ho
Dan La Botz
Farm Labor Organizer Murdered in Mexico
Giuliana Sgrena
The Lies of Mario Lozano
Laura Carlsen
A Moratorium on Free Trade Agreements
Abu Spinoza
Wolfowitz's Real Crimes
Elizabeth Schulte
Grinding It Out with Quentin Tarantino
Poets' Basement
Davies, Harley, Engel and Landau
Website of
the Weekend
Vonnegut's Final Interview
April 13,
2007
Patrick Cockburn
The
Shattering of Mosul
Stephen Soldz
Aid
and Comfort for Torturers: Psychology and Coercive Interrogations
in Historical Perspective
George Ciccarriello-Maher
The
Failed Chávez Coup: Five Years On
Laith al-Saud
Kirkuk, Oil and the Kurds
Dave Zirin
Memo to Imus
John Ross
Drawing a Line in the Heartland
Ramzy Baroud
America as Proxy
Harvey Wasserman
The Novelist Who Hated War: Peace Be With You, Mr. Vonnegut
Lopez, Olivo and Garcia
Columbia University's Two-Tiered Punishments
Dols, Fukumori,
Judd and Tillett-Saks
Columbia: On the Wrong Side of Justice
Website of the Day
Democrats: an Iraq Scorecard
April 12,
2007
JoAnn Wypijewski
We
May be Rid of Imus, But We're Still Stuck with the Culture
Paul Craig
Roberts
Big Profits from Big Brother
Marjorie Cohn
U.S. Attorneys and Voting Rights
Evelyn Pringle
Bush Family War Profiteering: Will Congress Finally Cut Them
Off?
Ron Jacobs
God
Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut
Norman Solomon
The Awful Truth About Hillary, Barack and John
Joe DeRaymond
The Release of Dennis Counterman: The Justice Game, the Alford
Plea and Death Row
Nicola Nasser
Squeezing Palestinians into an Impossible Mission
Nikolas Kozloff
Chile, a Country Geographically Located in South America "By
Accident"
William S.
Lind
Horatio Hornblower's Worst Nightmare
Siegfried L. Sassoon
A Statement Against the Continuation of the War
Website of
the Day
Where
You Want This Killin' Done?
April 11, 2007
R. T. Naylor
Quebec's
Lessons for the US: How "Wars on Terror" Should be
Fought
Vijay Prashad
The
Generation of IEDs and iPods
Patrick Cockburn
The Myth of Tal Afar
Winslow T. Wheeler
When Will the War Money Really Run Out?
Jack Balkwill
Prison for a Peacemaker: A Vietnam Vet Interviews Kathy Kelly
Alan Farago
Florida's Fundamentally Weak Environmental Movement
Russell D.
Hoffman
The Carbon Offset Tax is Just Another Nuke Bailout
Peter Rost, MD
The Fine Print on Drug Industry Kickbacks
Mike Whitney
Doomsday for the Greenback?
Dave Lindorff
Torture and Selective Outrage
Susie Day
Peter Pace Porks a Peck of Pinko Perverts
Website of the Day
Save the Internet!
April 10,
2007
James G. Abourezk
How
Syria Helped the US in the "War on Terror"-and How
Bush Said "Thanks"
Earl Ofari
Hutchinson
Why Imus Should be Fired-And Why He Won't Be
Joshua Frank
Democrats for War
Lee Sustar
How Concessions by UAW Lost Jobs
Joseph Grosso
Tiger Woods in Dubai: Luxury and Exploitation
Nirmal Ghosh
China and the Fate of the Tiger
Robert Jensen
Impeach the System
Ramzy Baroud
Not an Intellectual Squabble
Paul Rockwell
History Will Vindicate Lt. Ehren Watada
Mario Joseph
and
Brian Concannon
Solidaridad? Chávez in Haiti
Fred Wilhelms
Why the New Royalty Rates Hurt Artists
Website of
the Day
Thaw!
April 9,
2007
Saul Landau
Whining
Imperialists
Uri Avnery
Shalom, Shin Bet
Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Nightmare: an Interview with Nahla Al-Arian
Gideon Levy
Israel Does Not Want Peace
Corporate Crime Reporter
Big Coal Invokes Reverse Nuremberg Defense
Evelyn Pringle
The Surge in Casualties
Hill Kemp
Mega Lessons from Iraq War, Year 5
Martha Rosenberg
Monsanto's
Desperate Plea: "Regulate Our Competitors!"
Keith Rosenthal
Behind Boston's Recent "Crime Wave"
Jane Stillwater
Green Zone Cabin Fever
Website of the Day
Support Norman Finkelstein
April 7 / 8, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
Dead
Dogs Don't Bleed: How Giuliani Lost America
Sara Roy
A Jewish Plea
Arno J. Mayer
Back to Cleopatra's Nose: Bush-Bashing and Empire's Onward March
Jeffrey St.
Clair
In the Realm of the Grizzly Kings
Vicente Navarro
Why Huntington and Beck Are Wrong
Fidel Castro
Where Have All the Bees Gone? And Other Reflections on the Internationalizaton
of Genocide
Fred Gardner
Medical News from the Business Pages
Ralph Nader
The IRS Owes You Money
David N. Rahni
Test Tube Zealots: American Chemical Society Purges Iranian Chemists
Arthur Neslen
When an Anti-Semite is Not an Anti-Semite
Pratyush Chandra
Joseph Stiglitz's "Another World"
Missy Beattie
Enough Already! The Politics of Exasperation
Marc Levy
A Beginner's Guide to Combat
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Holt, Orloski and Louise
Website of the Weekend
Reactor Man
April 6,
2007
Franklin Lamb
Why
is Hezbollah on the Terrorism List?
Gloria La Riva
On the Case of the Cuban Five and Luis Posada Carriles
Corporate Crime Reporter
The Politics of Coal in West Virginia
Ron Jacobs
Good Friday, Beethoven and Patti Smith
Felice Pace
Simon Says: The Pro-Israel Bias of NPR
Walter Brasch
Treason in the White House?
David Swanson
Heroes, Sung and Unsung
Sylvia Syracuse
Roadside Rampage: Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala
April 5, 2007
Patrick Cockburn
A
De Facto Hostage Exchange
Tom Barry
The Fred Thompson Factor
Richard W. Behan
Congressional Complicity
Nicola Nasser
Playing US Politics with Iraqi Blood for Oil
Bernadine Dohrn
The New and Old SDS: Convergence Not Division
Laray Polk
Lucky Dragon: Does the World Really Need a New H-Bomb?
Helen Redmond
Female Chauvinist Pigs?
April 4,
2007
Col. Dan Smith
"Have
You No Sense of Decency?": the Tillman Affair and the Moral
Decay of the Army
Joshua Frank
Democratic
Blood Money: Sen. Feinstein's War Profiteering
Margaret Kimberly
Of Confessions and Torture
Sharon Smith
Circuit City's Guinea Pigs: the Latest Trend in Corporate America
Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
Martin Luther
King,Jr.
Beyond
Vietnam
Bill Quigley
Incident at Fort Huachuca, the Army's Torture Training Center
Dave Zirin
Picking Chicago's Pockets with the Olympics
Evelyn Pringle
Drug Companies Want Women of Childrearing Years
Peter Rost,
MD
Pfizer's Puny Fine
Website of the Day
Crash of the Honey Bees
April 3,
2007
Patrick Cockburn
US's
Bungled Plan to Kidnap Iran's Top Spook Prompted hostage Taking
Marjorie Cohn
Coming Up Short on Habeas Corpus for Gitmo Detainees
Brian M. Downing
The Army's Road to Iraq
Corporate Crime
Reporter
Coddling
Pfizer: Praise the Criminal, Dis the Whistleblower
Carol Norris
A Psychologist on Sexual Assault: Yes, Virginia, There is a Sollution
Ralph Nader
Tailpipe Blues
Dave Lindorff
I Quit: A Movement of One (Or a Maybe a Million)
Scott Bontz
The Great Depletion
Thomas Dolby
Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Racism and the National Anthem
Website of
the Day
Cockburn on BookTV
April 2, 2007
Gary Leupp
A
Bogus Hostage Crisis
Uri Avnery
Condi
in the Middle East: Olmert and the Pussycat
James Petras
Palestine: The Political Economy of a Disaster
Norman Solomon
McCain in Baghdad: Walking in McNamara's Footsteps
Robert Fisk
War of Humiliation
Stanley Heller
A Neocon Looks Two Conquests Ahead: The Ravings of James Woolsey
Sherwood Ross
How the Pentagon Cheats Iraq Vets Out of Medical Care and Disability
Pay
Monica Benderman
On Keeping Men Alive: Report from Ft. Stewart
Stephen Fleischman
Winners and Losers in a Dog-Eat-Dog System
Anne McElroy
Dachel
Never Mind the Mercury
Website of the Day
Midwestern Common Sense on the War
March 31 / April 1, 2007
Cockburn /
St. Clair
That
Was an Antiwar Vote?
Fred Gardner
How Corrupt is Malcolm Gladwell? Shilling for Enron and Breast
Cancer
Greg Moses
The Pirates of Homeland Security
Gary Leupp
300 vs. Iran (and Herodotus)
Robert Fisk
Shakespeare and War
Roger Morris
The Politics of the Witch Hunt
Conn Hallinan
The Price of Fire: Oil, Water and Resistance in Bolivia
Kristin J.
Anderson
A Protocol for Death
Jason Hribal
California's Most Unhappy Cows
John Ross
Strange Fruit Down South
Christopher Brauchli
Bush and the Politics of Falsehoods: If You're Going to Lie,
Lie Big
David Underhill
War Breeds Stranger Bedfellows
Elizabeth Schulte
The Pentagon's "Don't Ask" Disaster
Ben Terrall
Time for Lula to Stop Doing Bush's Dirty Work in Haiti
Missy Beattie
Guess Who Isn't Coming to Dinner: The Story of King Abdullah
and the O-Word
Sonja Karkar
How Palestine Became Israel's Land
Daniel Wolff
Have You Heard the News?
David Vest
A Romanian Jazz Rebel Drops a Bomb on Paris
Ron Jacobs
Wynton Marsalis Checks In on the Land That Never Has Been Yet
Poets' Basement
Davies, Holt, Wigley and Landau
Website of the Weekend
Kansas City Rocks
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"Mission
Accomplished" Weekend Edition
April 28 / 29, 2007
Nukes
are Not Green
The
Lesson of Chernobyl
By HARVEY WASSERMAN
Twenty-one years ago this week, lethal
radiation poured into the breezes over Europe and into the jet
stream above, carrying death and disease around the planet.
It could be happening again as you read this: either by error,
as at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, or by terror, as could
have happened on September 11, 2001.
Those who now advocate a "rebirth" of this failed technology
forget what happened during these "impossible" catastrophes,
or refuse to face their apocalyptic reality, both ecological
and financial.
Radiation monitors in Sweden, hundreds of miles away, first detected
the fallout from the blast at Chernobyl Unit 4. The reactor
complex had just been extolled in the Soviet press as the ultimate
triumph of a "new generation" in atomic technology.
The Gorbachev government hushed up the accident, then reaped
a whirlwind of public fury that helped bring down the Soviet
Union. The initial silence in fact killed people who might otherwise
have taken protective measures. In downtown Kiev, just 80 kilometers
away, a parade of uninformed citizens---many of them very young---celebrated
May Day amidst a hard rain of lethal fallout. It should never
have happened.
Ten days after the explosion, radiation monitors at Point Reyes
Station, on the California coast, detected that fallout. A sixty
percent drop in bird births soon followed. (The researcher who
made that public was fired).
Before they happened, reactor pushers said accidents like those
at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were "impossible."
But.
To this day, no one knows how much radiation escaped from TMI,
where it went or who it harmed. But 2400 central Pennsylvanians
who have sued to find out have been denied their day in court
for nearly thirty years. The epithet "no one died at Three
Mile Island" is baseless wishful thinking.
To this day also, no one knows how much radiation escaped from
 Chernobyl, where it went and
who was harmed. Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor
to the late President Boris Yeltsin, and president of the Center
for Russian Environmental Policy, estimates the death toll at
300,000. The infant death and childhood cancer rates in the
downwind areas have been horrific. Visual images of the innumerable
deformed offspring make the most ghastly science fiction movies
seem tame.
Industry apologists have stretched the limits of common decency
to explain away these disasters. Patrick Moore, who falsely
claims to be a founder of Greenpeace, has called TMI a "success
story." An industry doctor long ago argued that Chernobyl
would somehow "lower the cancer rate."
In human terms, such claims are beneath contempt. As one of
the few reporters to venture into central Pennsylvania to study
the health impacts of TMI, I can recall no worse experience in
my lifetime than interviewing the scores of casualties.
The farmers made clear, with appalling documentation, that the
animal death toll alone was horrendous. But the common human
symptoms, ranging from a metallic taste the day of the accident
to immediate hair loss, bleeding sores, asthma and so much more,
came straight out of easily available literature from Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
There is no mystery about what happened downwind from TMI, only
a conscious, well-funded corporate, media and judicial blackout.
At Chernobyl, the experience was repeated a thousand-fold. More
than 800,000 (that's NOT a typo) Soviet draftees were run through
the radioactive ruins as "jumpers," being exposed for
90 seconds or so to do menial clean-up work before hustling out.
The ensuing cancer rate has been catastrophic (this huge cohort
of very angry young men subsequently played a key role in bringing
down the Soviet Union).
In both cases, "official" literature negating (at TMI)
or minimizing (at Chernobyl) the death toll are utter nonsense.
The multiple killing powers of radiation remain as much a medical
mystery as how much fallout escaped in each case and where it
went.
The economic impacts are not so murky. Moore's assertion that
TMI was a success story is literally insane. A $900 million
asset became a $2 billion clean-up job in a matter of minutes.
At Chernobyl, the cost of the accident in lost power, damaged
earth, abandoned communities and medical nightmares has been
conservatively estimated at a half-trillion dollars, and still
climbing.
The price of a melt-down or terror attack at an American nuke
is beyond calculation. In most cases, reactors built in areas
once far from population centers have now been surrounded by
development, some of it bumping right up to the plant perimeters.
Had the jets that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 instead
hit Indian Point Units Two and Three, 45 miles north, the human
and financial costs would have been unimaginable. Imagine the
entire metropolitan New York area being made permanently uninhabitable,
and then calculate out what happens to the US economy.
There remains no way to protect any of the roughly 450 commercial
reactors on this planet from either terror attack or an error
on the part of plant operators.
Those advocating more nukes ignore the myriad good reasons why
no private insurance company has stepped forward to insure them
against catastrophe. Those who say future accidents are impossible
forget that exactly the same was said of TMI and Chernobyl.
The commercial fuel cycle DOES emit global warming in the uranium
enrichment process. Uranium mining kills miners. Milling leaves
billions of tons of tailings that emit immeasurable quantities
of radioactive radon. Regular reactor operations spew direct
heat in to the air and water. They also pump fallout into the
increasingly populated surroundings, with impacts on the infant
death rate that have already been measured and proven. And,
of course, there is no solution for the management of high-level
waste, a problem the industry promised would be solved a half-century
ago.
Economically, early forays into a "new generation"
of reactors have already been plagued by huge cost overruns and
construction delays. At best they would take ten to fifteen
years to build, by which time renewable sources and efficiency---which
are already cheaper than new nukes---will have totally outstripped
this failed technology. Small wonder Wall Street wants no part
of this radioactive hype, which is essentially just another
corporate campaign for taxpayer handouts.
This past Earth Day an orgy of corporate greenwashing, aided
by the always-compliant major media, tried to portray nukes as
"green" energy. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
We will never get to Solartopia, a sustainable economy based
on renewables and efficiency, as long as atomic power sucks up
our resources and threatens us with extinction.
Twenty-one years ago this week, Chernobyl became something far
worse than a mere warning beacon. The radiation it spewed still
travels our jet stream, still lodges in our bodies, still harms
our children.
Only by burying this failed, murderous beast can we get to a
truly green future.
Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA since
1990, is author of "Solartopia:
Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030,"
|
Now
Available!
The Gang's
All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rupert
Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End
Times
Leaves No Reputation Unstained!
Buy End Times Now!
Now
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CounterPunch Books!
Saul Landau's
Bush and Botox World
with a Foreword by Gore Vidal
Click Here to Order!
"The Case Against Israel"
Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz
WHAT'S
INSIDE
Grand
Theft Pentagon:
Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror
by Jeffrey St. Clair
The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn
CITY BEAUTIFUL
By Tennessee Reed
Bruce Springsteen On Tour
By Dave Marsh
The Book on 9/11 the White House Denounced
as "ABSOLUTE GARBAGE"
|
