STEPHANIE COOKE – It’s hard to see how any of the nuclear hype becomes real unless Congress is ready to ignore market signals, nationalize the electricity sector, and rebuild an industrial infrastructure that disappeared decades ago.
Category: July 2023
Oppenheimer Film Offers Great Organizing Opportunity
ROBERT DODGE – I attended this weekend’s Los Angeles opening of Christopher Nolan’s epic film, Oppenheimer. This must-see film provides a critical opening for an essential conversation about nuclear weapons and their role in our security and the fate of the planet.
Four Big Banks refuse to renew loans to Whitehaven Coal
JIM MCLLROY – Environment groups said the refusal by [Australia’s] Big Four banks to renew a $1 billion loan to Whitehaven Coal — the country’s biggest coal-only mining company — is a win for people power.
The Pimps of War
CHRIS HEDGES – The same cabal of war mongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.
Who Needs Chinese Scientists? America Does
MEL GURTOV – Let’s remember that no one appreciates academic freedom more than visitors from China and other countries under authoritarian rule. When that freedom is violated by harassment and suspicion, word gets back to China very quickly, and the rewards for returning to China, in money and prestige, become tantalizing.
History Repudiates Three Key Myths About Human Societies
GARY M. FEINMAN – The New Gilded Age, wars along the Russian border, a global pandemic, battles for women’s rights, even the Titanic: history does rhyme with the present. Yet as former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert once observed: “If history tells us anything, it’s that we never learn from history.”
THE SUPREME COURT DIDN’T PUT RACISM ON A LEASH. IT GRANTED IT LICENSE.
CHARLES M. BLOW – There is a recurrent theme in American history: the clawing back of hard-won progress. And the Supreme Court used the most specious of arguments to do so with affirmative action.
Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine Is a Grave Mistake
PATRICK HILLER – The War Prevention Initiative condemns the decision by the United States government to send cluster bombs to Ukraine in the latest arms shipment package. Cluster bombs kill and maim civilians indiscriminately during and after war. They are also a major threat to the environment, contaminating land for decades after they are used. In short, cluster bombs do not win wars and will only hurt current and future generations of Ukrainians.
It’s Time to Stop the ‘Insect Apocalypse’
ROBERT C. kOEHLER – Back to pesticides then. Back to weed killers. Back to climate change and the apparent inability of the polluters who purport to be in charge of Planet Earth to address it adequately: Superficial change won’t do it. The change has to be cultural. It has to be spiritual. Believe me, if we fail to change who we are and the bees — the pollinators — disappear, we’ll all feel the sting.
Despite Warnings, IAEA Approves Japan Release Plan for Contaminated Fukushima Water
JON QUEALLY – Despite years of protest and warnings from environmentalists, the United Nation’s nuclear watchdog on Tuesday (July 4th) approved a plan by Japan to release tens of millions of gallons of water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean.
Decency Requires a Change in Immigration Policy
DEREK ROYDEN – In the years ahead, as climate change truly takes hold, wealthier nations are going to have to make even more difficult decisions about what to do about those fleeing unlivable situations. Unfortunately, as the story of the SS St. Louis and more contemporary reactions to migration show, we don’t have a very good track record in this regard. Can we repair our historical amnesia enough to not only avoid committing moral outrage, but once again strengthening our societies by welcoming immigrants and refugees?
The Patriotism of Killing and Being Killed
NORMAN SOLOMON – The Fourth of July — the ultimate patriotic holiday — is [here] again. Politicians orate, American Flags proliferate and, even more than usual, many windows on the world are tinted red, white and blue. But an important question remains unasked: Why are patriotism and war so intertwined in U.S. media and politics?
How Daniel Ellsberg Helped End the Vietnam War
RUSSELL VANDENBROUCKE – Daniel Ellsberg, sent to Saigon in 1965 to evaluate civilian pacification programs, would spend 18 months with patrols into towns and villages. His skeptical reports about death and destruction and potential victory by North Vietnam went nowhere. Ellsberg struggled with his knowledge. He was a family man with a brilliant career, all of which would be at risk if he blew the whistle, and he knew it.
The Russian Coup That Wasn’t
MEL GURTOV – Tensions between the Russian defense ministry and the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, had been running high for months, mainly because of differences over war strategy and Prigozhin’s accusations of insufficient battlefield support. Last week those tensions reached the boiling point. And now Putin is stuck, a position that the US and NATO can choose either to exploit or, hopefully, to press for peace.