Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear explodes the myths now being promulgated by those promoting nuclear power.
He tells of the insoluble problems of nuclear waste, how nuclear power plants routinely emit radioactive poisons, how catastrophic accidents can happen, how nuclear power plants are pre-deployed weapons of mass destruction for terrorists, and the enormously high costs of nuclear power.
He exposes the falsehood that the French nuclear program has been a success and that nuclear power does not contribute to global warming.

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The offshore oil drilling catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico brought to us by BP has overshadowed its central role over the past century in fostering some other disastrous events.

BP originated in 1908 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company—a British corporation whose name was changed to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company two decades later. With exclusive rights to extract, refine, export, and sell Iran's rich oil resources, the company reaped enormous profits. Meanwhile, it shared only a tiny fraction of the proceeds with the Iranian government. Similarly, although the company's British personnel lived in great luxury, its Iranian laborers endured lives of squalor and privation.

In 1947, as Iranian resentment grew at the giant oil company's practices, the Iranian parliament called upon the Shah, Iran's feudal potentate, to renegotiate the agreement with Anglo-Iranian. Four years later, Mohammed Mossadeq, riding a tide of nationalism, became the nation's prime minister. As an enthusiastic advocate of taking control of Iran's oil resources and using the profits from them to develop his deeply impoverished nation, Mossadeq signed legislation, passed unanimously by the country's parliament, to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

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President Barack Obama’s Prague statement calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons has been lauded worldwide. But Obama is a politician facing huge pressures. At Obama’s inauguration, Vincent Harding, close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, stated of Obama that we must be “the wind at his back.” That is what many people, including Central New Yorkers, were doing at NGO events preceding the May 3 to 28 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference at the United Nations in New York City and throughout the month. Readers can do so as well, by contacting our elected representatives about the necessity of nuclear weapons abolition.

Today nine countries maintain nuclear arsenals, over 23,000 warheads, 95 percent of which are held by the United States and Russia. These uniquely destructive weapons can destroy life on our planet many times over. They are used as political weapons of terror, reinforcing global inequality.

Eradication of these weapons will end the threat of global annihilation and end this hierarchy of terror. It will unlock enormous resources to address global warming and mass poverty, and to lead in the global trend towards demilitarization.

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On the relatively rare occasions when the media turns its attention to U.S. weapons sales abroad and shines its not-so-bright spotlight on the latest set of facts and figures, it invariably speaks of “the global arms trade.”

Let’s consider that label for a moment, word by word:
• It is global, since there are few places on the planet that lie beyond the reach of the weapons industry.
• Arms sounds so old-fashioned and anodyne when what we’re talking about is advanced technology designed to kill and maim.
• And trade suggests a give and take among many parties when, if we’re looking at the figures for that “trade” in a clear-eyed way, there is really just one seller and so many buyers.

How about updating it this way: “the global weapons monopoly.”

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Watch the slideshow for more information.

Take action; contact your Congressional Representative and Senator or write a letter to the editor.

US Reps

Dear Mr. Brooks, In your January 15, 2010 opinion piece in The New York Times, “The Underlying Tragedy,” you present what you seem to believe is a bold assessment of the situation in Haiti and what you certainly know is a provocative recommendation for Haiti’s future. You also offer some advice to President Obama. In order to successfully keep his promise to the people of Haiti that they “will not be forsaken” nor “forgotten” the President, you say, has to “acknowledge a few difficult truths.” What follows, however, is so shockingly ignorant of Haitian history and culture and so saturated with the language and ideology of cultural imperialism that no valuable “truths” remain. Please allow us, therefore, to present you with some more accurate truths.

First, Haiti is not a clear-cut case of the failure of international aid to achieve poverty reduction. For almost its entire existence Haiti has been shouldered with a load of immense international debt. The Haitian people had the audacity to break their chains and declare independence in 1804 but were later forced by France to re-purchase their freedom for 150 million Francs, a burden that the country has had to carry throughout the twentieth century.

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Dear Congressman Maffei:

There is much work to be done by those of us who seek a peaceful and just world, a world without the threat of nuclear annihilation. Nuclear weapons present enormous problems for all of us but their danger cannot be divorced from the threat which nuclear power plants represent. One of the many issues surrounding nuclear power is nuclear waste. No safe, permanent solution has yet been found anywhere in the world for the nuclear waste problem. It appears you have recognized this problem by signing on to the letter urging cleanup of West Valley. Thank you so much for this important action.

In the U.S. the only identified and flawed high-level radioactive waste repository site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada where the US wanted to build a maze of tunnels inside Yucca Mountain to store 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent reactor fuel and defense waste is no longer being considered. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will continue to review the license application for the Yucca Mountain repository for the present, even though the Obama administration has made clear it wants to pursue other waste storage options. The NRC will have funds to continue the application review process in 2010. But the White House has said it intends to cut all funding from the Yucca Mountain project in 2011, including money needed for the licensing process to move forward. President Obama will release his 2011 budget proposal this month (January)." YuccaMoiuntain.org (Eureka County, Nevada-Nuclear Waste Office).

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Israel's relentless drive to establish "facts on the ground" in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that "achievement," one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from "the only democracy in the Middle East" to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

The inevitability of such a transformation has been held out not by "Israel bashers" but by the country's own leaders. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to that danger, as did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who warned that Israel could not escape turning into an apartheid state if it did not relinquish "almost all the territories, if not all," including the Arab parts of East Jerusalem.

Olmert ridiculed Israeli defense strategists who, he said, had learned nothing from past experiences and were stuck in the mindset of the 1948 war of independence. "With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop," he said. "All these things are worthless. Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"

It is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles--although denied by Israel's government--that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.

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When Noam Chomsky spoke at the Anderson Center a few years ago, he began his talk by stating that the two biggest threats we face are nuclear and environmental. He finished with the optimistic remark that both were within our capacity to eliminate.

He cited past successful social movements as examples, but I maintain that now it will take more than just public demand to eliminate these two. These threats and others like them are global in extent and social movements alone will go nowhere if there is no structure to implement them.

Here is a short list of some other global threats, not in any particular order of urgency or magnitude:

Article

Jerry Lotierzo (right) co-chairman of Peace Action of Central New York, and board member Bill Cross (center) present a leaflet protesting U.S. military spending to Jamie White, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer's deputy regional director.

The Peace Action contingent, which also included activist Howie Hawkins, visited the Federal Building offices of Schumer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei (D-DeWitt) today in Syracuse to urge them to support Rep. Barney Frank's call to cut military spending by 25 percent. Congress has authorized a $680 billion defense budget for 2010.

October 7, 2009 marks the eighth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Peace Action mourns this day, which is the first anniversary under the Obama administration. On October 5th, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "We're not leaving Afghanistan."

That day Peace Action staff and members from around the country reminded the administration that if the US isn't leaving then we aren't leaving either.

Check out photos from the No Good War protest that members of Peace Action Central NY and staff also took part in. Take action!

Photos
Action

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

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Introduction and Summary As part of its campaign to secure additional funding for the F-22 Raptor combat aircraft, the Lockheed Martin Corporation has asserted that 95,000 jobs are at stake if the program is terminated after the Pentagon’s preferred production run of 183 planes.

Using two different estimating techniques (elaborated below), F-22 expenditures generate jobs in the range of 35,000 to 37,000 per year-- less than 40% of the levels claimed by Lockheed Martin.

In addition, Lockheed Martin’s advertisements and fact sheets on this issue fail to stress the fact that any job losses that do occur as a result of ending the F-22 program will be stretched out over two and half years or more, suggesting that many of them may occur after the end of the current recession.

Finally, to the extent that additional funding for the F-22 program comes at the expense of public investments in areas such as education, infrastructure, and building weatherization, extending the F-22 program could result in a net job loss in the range of 9,300 to 47,000 jobs per year.

Article

Romeo Vasquez, a general who led the military coup in Honduras against President Manuel Zelaya, received training at the US School of the Americas. The SOA has trained more than 60,000 soldiers, many of whom have returned home and committed human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial execution and massacres.

According to School of the Americas Watch, Vasquez attended the SOA in 1976 and 1984. The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, also studied there in 1996. We speak with Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of the School of the Americas Watch.

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Total Outlays (Federal Funds): $2,650 billion
MILITARY: 54% and $1,449 billion
NON-MILITARY: 46% and $1,210 billion

Fifty-four percent of the taxes you pay goes to a combination of current military spending and interest on the Federal debt attributable to past military spending.

Source: War Resisters League

The Afghanistan policy recently announced by President Obama is economically unsustainable. Even before the escalation of troops, the cost of our military intervention in Afghanistan is more than $2 billion per month and rising.

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Reaffirming that the era when our countries viewed each other as enemies is long over, and recognizing our many common interests, we today established a substantive agenda for Russia and the United States to be developed over the coming months and years. We are resolved to work together to strengthen strategic stability, international security, and jointly meet contemporary global challenges, while also addressing disagreements openly and honestly in a spirit of mutual respect and acknowledgement of each other’s perspective.

We discussed measures to overcome the effects of the global economic crisis, strengthen the international monetary and financial system, restore economic growth, and advance regulatory efforts to ensure that such a crisis does not happen again.

We also discussed nuclear arms control and reduction. As leaders of the two largest nuclear weapons states, we agreed to work together to fulfill our obligations under Article VI of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and demonstrate leadership in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world. We committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear free world, while recognizing that this long-term goal will require a new emphasis on arms control and conflict resolution measures, and their full implementation by all concerned nations.

We agreed to pursue new and verifiable reductions in our strategic offensive arsenals in a step-by-step process, beginning by replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new, legally-binding treaty. We are instructing our negotiators to start talks immediately on this new treaty and to report on results achieved in working out the new agreement by July.

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Why
Because we can end world hunger with 10% of what is spent on arms. Imagine how life would be if 30-50% of the arms budget went toward improving people’s lives instead of being used for destruction. Because eliminating wars and violence means leaving human pre-history behind and taking a giant step forward in the evolution of our species.

Because we are accompanied by the voices of all the war-torn generations that came before us. The echo of their voices still resounds throughout the world, wherever armed conflict leaves its sinister memorial to the dead, disappeared, disabled and displaced.

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It’s time to rethink Afghanistan and Pakistan. Otherwise, the new Obama administration will be led into a yawning quagmire.

It’s time for fact-based policies to replace faith-base ones.

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Over the last eight years, the Bush administration has systematically dismantled some of the most important rights and protections in the United States Constitution. In the first 100 days of office, President Obama can, often with the stroke of a pen, restore, protect, and expand the fundamental rights on which our nation was founded. It is up to all of us to see that he does.

The Center for Constitutional Rights' 100 Days Campaign focuses on the harm done by previous administrations and the hopes we have for making the country a better place for all.

Join us in telling the Obama administration what you want to see in the first 100 days. This campaign includes a series of white papers, videos, speaking tours and online activism that will bring these issues front and center in the public debate.

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Over the next several months there will be a battle for hearts and minds, but not in Iraq or Afghanistan. The war will be here at home, waged mostly in the halls of Congress, where grim lobbyists for one of the top 15 economies in the world are digging in to preserve their stake in the massive U.S. military budget. With the country in deep recession and resources dwindling for the new administration's programs on health care, education, and the environment, the outcome of this battle may well end up defining the next four years.

But coming to grips with the issue, as one military analyst noted, is likely to resemble the worst of World War I trench warfare. "It will be like the British Army at the Somme," Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information (CDI) told the Boston Globe, "you will just get mowed down by the defense industry."

Up Against the Industry
For starters, there are 185,000 corporations behind those metaphorical machine guns, and a few are formidable indeed: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Alliant Techsystems, United Technologies, Textron, Teledyne, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Texas Instruments, just to name a few.

The World Policy Institute found that dozens of high Bush administration officials were former arms company executives, consultants, or shareholders, and that this network of influence reaches deep into Congress. The combination of lobbying and PAC money that pours into election coffers every two years gives the arms industry enormous influence over the actions of the executive and legislative branches.

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As the bombardment of Gaza enters its third week and the civilian death toll continues to rise, Clinton's remarks offer a thin ray of hope that the next president will deviate from the long-set pattern of U.S.-Israeli relations.

The Bush administration has been unwilling to use the considerable U.S. influence -- as Israel's major military and political backer -- to dissuade the government in Tel Aviv from its pattern of claiming self-defense while perpetrating collective punishment, human rights violations, and massively disproportionate attacks that harm and kill civilians.

If the next administration is making a genuine commitment to "a just and lasting peace that brings real security to Israel, normal and positive relations with its neighbors; independence, economic progress and security to the Palestinians in their own state" -- as Hillary Clinton described the vision for the future -- they will have their work cut out for them.

Arms Package
That work begins with a reevaluation of the financial and military commitment the United States made to Israel. During the Bush administration, Israel received over $21 billion in U.S. security assistance, including $19 billion in direct military aid under the Pentagon's Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. Through the FMF program, Israel remains the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid each year, which they use to purchase U.S. weapons.

The bulk of Israel's current arsenal is composed of equipment supplied under U.S. assistance programs. For example, Israel has 226 U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter and attack jets, over 700 M-60 tanks, 6,000 armored personnel carriers, and scores of transport planes, attack helicopters, utility and training aircraft, bombs, and tactical missiles of all kinds.

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We must raise our collective voices to demand that the United States intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing that is taking place and has been taking place in Gaza since the Israelis have occupied the region. Former President Carter was right when he called Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories "apartheid.”

The recent unrelenting bombing of Gaza by the state of Israel is the latest attempt to cleanse the area, not of Hamas, but of all Palestinians. The seeds of right wing Zionism were planted in 1896 by the fanatical Theodore Herzl who found receptive ears among the Diaspora that it was their G-d given right to return to the land entrusted to them by the Almighty.

It is not coincidence that evangelical right-wing Christians align themselves with Israel for they believe in the same divine inspiration. Zionists began the move to Palestine after the Balfour Declaration and recruited Jews from all over the world to join the precursor to the Israeli Defense Force, the Haganah. Despite what revisionist historians want you to believe, the Haganah adopted terrorist techniques to drive the British and 700,00 plus Palestinians from their homeland. Some of the so called present day freedom fighters leaders like Yitzhak Shamir, Menachim Begin, and Ariel Sharon to name a few would be labeled terrorists today for the bombings, killings, and wanton destruction they perpetrated. But no one can say or write these things without being labeled anti-Semitic.

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New York State's public services—particularly education, healthcare, and programs for the poor—are currently in turmoil thanks to state budget slashing led by Governor David Paterson.

In the spring of 2008, shortly after the legislature adopted the 2008-09 budget, Paterson ordered a 3.35 percent cut in the operating budgets of state agencies. Later in the year, pointing to a $630 million deficit that had opened up in the 2008-09 budget and to a projected $6.4 billion deficit in the one for 2009-10, he ordered state agencies to make additional 7 percent cuts. In August, under pressure from the governor, the New York State legislature enacted measures that will cut back expenditures significantly in both fiscal years. And in mid-November, Paterson proposed an additional $2 billion in spending cuts for 2008-09.

Why is the New York governor doing this—particularly when, with the economy deteriorating, home foreclosures mounting, unemployment spreading, and hunger growing there is an increasing need for government to expand public services, not reduce them?

Paterson, business leaders, and others who advocate their slash and burn approach to state services point out that New York State is required by its constitution to maintain a balanced budget. Therefore, they argue, with the declining economy leading to a drop in state income, and with that drop in state income knocking the budget out of balance, they are forced to cut expenditures.

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In a remarkable combination of civil society pressure and leadership from a small number of progressive States, a strong ban on the use, manufacture, and stocking of cluster bombs was signed in Oslo, Norway on 3 December 2008. However, all bright sunlight casts a dark shadow, and in this case the shadow is the fact that the major makers and users of cluster munitions were deliberately not there: Brazil, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, USA.

Yet as arms negotiations go, the cluster bomb ban has been swift. They began in Oslo, Norway in February 2007 and were thus often called the “Oslo Process.” The negotiations were a justified reaction to their wide use by Israel in Lebanon during the July-August 2006 conflict. The UN Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC) working in southern Lebanon reported that their density there is higher than in Kosovo and Iraq, especially in built up areas, posing a constant threat to hundreds of thousands of people, as well as to UN peacemakers. It is estimated that one million cluster bombs were fired on south Lebanon during the 34 days of war, many during the last two days of war when a ceasefire was a real possibility. The Hezbollah militia also shot off rockets with cluster bombs into northern Israel.

Cluster munitions are warheads that scatter scores of smaller bombs. Many of these sub-munitions fail to detonate on impact, leaving them scattered on the ground, ready to kill and maim when disturbed or handled. Reports from humanitarian organizations and mine-clearing groups have shown that civilians make up the vast majority of the victims of cluster bombs, especially children attracted by their small size and often bright colors.

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Even saddled with a two-front, budget-busting war and a collapsing economy, President Barack Obama may be able to accomplish a lot. With a friendly Congress and a relieved world, he could make short work of some of the most egregious overreaches of the Bush White House -- from Guantanamo to those Presidential signing statements. For all the rolling up of sleeves and "everything is going to change" exuberance, however, taking on the Pentagon, with its mega-budget and its mega-power, may be the hardest task he faces.

The Mega-Pentagon
Under President George W. Bush, military spending increased by about 60%, and that's not including spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eight years ago, as Bush prepared to enter the Oval Office, military spending totaled just over $300 billion. When Obama sets foot in that same office, military spending will total roughly $541 billion, including the Pentagon's basic budget and nuclear warhead work in the Department of Energy.

And remember, that's before the Global War on Terror enters the picture. The Pentagon now estimates that military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost at least $170 billion in 2009, pushing total military spending for Obama's first year to about $711 billion (a number that is mind-bogglingly large and at the same time a relatively conservative estimate that does not, for example, include intelligence funding, veterans' care, or other security costs).

With such numbers, it's no surprise that the United States is, by a multiple of nearly six, the biggest military spender in the world. (China's military budget, the closest competitor, comes in at a "mere" $120 billion.) Still, it can be startling to confront the simple fact that the U.S. alone accounts for nearly half of all global military spending -- to be as exact as possible in such a murky area, 48% according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. That's more than what the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries on an annual basis.

Again, keep in mind that war spending for 2009 comes on top of the estimated $864 billion that lawmakers have, since 2001, appropriated for the Iraq war and occupation, ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, and other activities associated with the Global War on Terror. In fact, according to an October 2008 report by the Congressional Research Service, total war spending, quite apart from the regular military budget, is already at $922 billion and quickly closing in on the trillion dollar mark.

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As the war in Iraq changes from an invasion to a long-term occupation, the President no longer has Congressional authorization for the war. That means that Gov. Paterson is not required to accept the federalization of members of the New York State National Guard to serve in Iraq. Please join PANYS and our allies in a campaign to keep the New York Guard at home where they belong!


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