Environment

Pentagon Dirty Bombers: Depleted Uranium in the USA

dlindorff — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:27:12 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow
and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the US Army for a permit
to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch
of flat land in what’s called the “saddle” between the sacred mountains
of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, and at the Schofield
Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is
a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing
of M101 mortar “spotting rounds,” that each contained close to half a
pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that
any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many
as 2000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa
alone.

But that’s only a small part of the story.

The Army is actually seeking a master permit from the NRC to cover
all the sites where it has fired DU weapons, including penetrator
shells that, unlike the M101, are designed to hit targets and burn on
impact, turning the DU in the warhead into a fine dust of uranium oxide.

Depleted-uranium tipped M101 "spotting round" for Davy Crockett mortar

Uranium particles, whether pure uranium or in an oxidized form, are
alpha emitters, and can be highly carcinogenic and mutagenic if
ingested or inhaled, since they can lodge in one part of the body—the
kidney or lung or gonad, for example—and then irradiate surrounding
cells with large, destructive alpha particles (actually helium atoms),
until some gene is compromised and a cell become malignant.

Among the sites identified by the NRC as being contaminated with DU are:

Ft. Hood, TX
Ft. Benning, GA
Ft. Campbell, KY
Ft. Knox, KY
Ft. Lewis, WA
Ft. Riley, KS
Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD
Ft. Dix, NJ
Makua Military Reservation, HI

Other locations identified as having DU weapons contamination are:

China Lake Air Warfare Center, CA
Eglin AFB, Florida,
Nellis AFB, NV
Davis-Monthan AFB
Kirkland AFB, NM
White Sands Missile Range, NM
Ethan Allen Firing Range, VT
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

An application for a 99-year permit to test DU weapons at the NM
Inst. Of Mining and Technology claimed that that site’s test area was
“so contaminated with DU…as to preclude any other use”!

DU weapons have also been used by the Navy at Vieques Island off Puerto Rico (the Navy claimed it was a “mistake.”

The Pentagon continues a long history of claiming that DU is not
dangerous, although this official stance is belied by the warnings it
has given to its troops (though not to civilians in battle zones), to
stay well clear of tanks and other equipment destroyed by US tanks,
which used DU weapons as the ordnance of choice in both the Gulf War
and the current Iraq War. During both wars, DU ammunition was used by
Army and Marine tanks, by the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the A-10 ground
support jet, the Marine Harrier jet, and specially equipped F16 fighter
jets. The Navy also switched from DU ammunition to tungsten ammunition
in its Phalanx anti-missile ship defense system because of health and
environmental concerns with the DU ammo.

The Pentagon denies that it uses depleted uranium in bombs, missiles
and cruise missile warheads, but military personnel have reported their
use in all three delivery systems, and reports exist of DU
bunker-buster bombs, DU-tipped penetrator warheads on Tomahawk cruise
missiles and on some air-to-ground missiles.

It’s a good bet that all US munitions containing DU have been widely tested at various US military bases and testing grounds.

The bottom line is that at the same time that US government is
continuing to warn about the danger of terrorists acquiring the
materials to make a “dirty” bomb that could spread radioactive material
in the US, the US military has for years been doing exactly that, and
continues to do so, with no intention to clean up its messes, many of
which are allowing depleted uranium to percolate into ground water or
flow down streams to more populated areas.

Of course, it could have been worse. The M101 mortar that litters
Pohakuloa was actually designed as a range-finder for the Davy Crocket
mortar, which back in the late 1950s and the 1960s was designed to
allow infantry troops to fire a small “tactical” nuclear mortar shell
at targets just five miles distant. Some 700 of these “little nukes”,
that had a power of “just” several kilotons or less, were made and
actually made their way into the arsenals of troops in Europe and
elsewhere during the Cold War. Fortunately there are no reports of any
of them having been fired off at any of the military’s firing ranges.

Then again, the Pentagon doesn’t exactly have a sterling record
about telling the truth where nuclear weapons and DU weapons are
concerned.

Nor is the NRC to be relied on to protect the American public. As an
administrative judge wrote in a ruling on a case involving DU
contamination at Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana, the NRC exhibited
a “more than casual attitude with regard to decommissioning of sites on
which radioactive materials remain as a potential threat to public
health and safety and to the environment.”

In another case, involving cleanup of the ShieldAlloy Metallurgical
Corp.’s site in Newfield, NJ, where DU weapons were made, a judge said,
“at the very least, the (NRC) staff has countenanced…a situation that
will leave the citizens in the area surrounding the activity site in
doubt for close to two decades regarding what measures will ultimately
be taken for their protection.”
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Outrageous Thought of the Day: Nuclear Hypocrisy

dlindorff — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:47:22 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand
pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store
nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or
thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could
cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other
hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most
dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and
putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned
all across the landscape?

And I should note that it's not just remote places like Iraq and
Kuwait and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and
radioactive uranium dust--and I'm not just talking about the stuff that
gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff
that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough
as that is.

The truth is that depleted uranium weapons are being exploded and
burned right here in the USA in training operations. The center of
Hawaii's Big Island, for example, which is a military zone, is heavily
contaminated by DU ammunition fired by tanks there. The same is true of
Vieques Island, long a favored target for the Navy, which for years has
fired DU shells from its ships at the populated island, and also
launched DU-tipped missiles and dropped DU-loaded "bunker-buster" bombs
at it.

While I don't have direct knowledge, I'd say it's a safe bet that
there are a number of sites on the Mainland US where DU munitions have
also been widely used--maybe White Sands Proving Ground the Marine
training area near Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern
California, or other such training and testing areas.

The simple truth is that our own government, besides committing an
ongoing atrocity in the Middle East, is also poisoning our own country
with uranium oxide.

Our Nobel Peace Prize president should take note. President John F.
Kennedy reportedly moved to halt open air testing of nuclear weapons
after looking at the rain falling outside the window of the Oval Office
and asking a science advisor whether it was delivering nuclear fallout
to his front lawn (he was told that it was). Maybe President Obama
should consider that the rain today is delivering uranium dust to his
wife's and daughters' garden in the back yard of the White House. At
least he should take a look at pictures of the horribly deformed babies
being born to mothers in Iraq (and of the lucky babies that are
stillborn), thanks to the radioactive warfare that the US military has
been employing against both that country and Afghanistan--his
"necessary" war.

There is another irony here too. The US is expressing concern about
Iran enriching uranium, and possibly creating a nuclear bomb, which in
the unlikely event that it were ever used, might spread some
radioactivity around parts of the Middle east, yet it is the US which
already has spread 2000 or more tons of uranium dust all over Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 18 years--far more than any small Iranian bomb could release.

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is
"The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Depleted Uranium Weapons: The Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan Are No Joke

dlindorff — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:08:18 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15,
could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted
uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300
tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban,
populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan
War.

Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not
depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only
to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions
in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material from nuclear power
plants, DU as it is known, is what is removed from the power plants’
spent fuel rods and is essentially composed of the uranium isotope
U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission, not found
in nature), as well as other trace radioactive elements. Once simply a
nuisance for the industry, that still has no permanent way to dispose
of the dangerous stuff, it turns out to be an ideal metal for a number
of weapons uses, and has been capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times
heavier than lead, and much harder than steel, and with the added
property of burning at a super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an
ideal penetrator for warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense
concrete bunkers made of reinforced concrete and steel. Once through
the defenses, it burns at a temperature that incinerates anyone inside
(which is why we see the carbonized bodies of bodies in the wreckage of
Iraqi tanks hit by US fire). Accordingly it has found its way into 30
mm machine gun ammunition, especially that used by the A-10 Warthog
ground-attack fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan
(as well as Kosovo). It is also the warhead of choice for Abrams tanks
and is also reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later GBU-37 bunker
buster bombs, each of which can have 1-2 tons of the stuff in its
warhead. DU is also used as ballast in cruise missiles, and this burns
up when a missile detonates its conventional explosive. Some cruise
missiles are also designed to hit hardened targets and reportedly
feature DU warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-ground missile, which
carries a one-ton penetrating warhead. In addition, depleted uranium is
used in large quantities in the armor of tanks and other equipment.
This material becomes a toxic source of CU pollution when these
vehicles are attacked and burned.

While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific
evidence, that there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops
in Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these
weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers,
etc.—and to wear masks if they do have to approach. Many torched
vehicles have been brought back to the US, where they have been buried
in special sites reserved for dangerously contaminated nuclear
materials. (Thousands of tons of DU-contaminated sand from Kuwait,
polluted with DU during the US destruction of Iraq’s tank forces in the
1991 war, were removed and shipped to a waste site in Idaho last year
with little fanfare.) Suspiciously, international health officials have
been prevented or obstructed from doing medical studies of DU sites in
Iraq and Afghanistan. But an excellent series of articles several years
ago by the Christian Science Monitor
described how reporters from that newspaper had visited such sites in
Iraq with Geiger-counters and had found them to be extremely “hot” with
radioactivity.

The big danger with DU is not as a pure metal, but after it has
exploded and burned, when the particles of uranium oxide, which are
just as radioactive as the pure isotopes, can be inhaled or ingested.
Even the smallest particle of uranium in the body is both deadly
poisonous as a chemical, and over time can cause cancer—particularly in
the lungs, but also the kidneys, testes and ovaries.

There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of
deformed babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons
were in wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US
Marines. The British TV station SKY UK, in a report last month that has
received no mention in any mainstream American news organization, found
a marked increase in birth defects at local hospitals. Birth defects
have also been high for years in the Basra area in the south of Iraq,
where DU was used not just during America’s 2003 “shock and awe” attack
on Iraq, but also in the 1991 Gulf War.

Further, a report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr Nawal
Majeed Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs since 2006,
stated that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies
born, 24% of which died within their first week of life. Worse yet,
fully 75% of the babies born that month were deformed. This compares to
August 2002, six months before the US invasion, when 530 live births
were reported with only six dying in the first week, and only one
deformity. Clearly something terrible is happening in Fallujah, and
many doctors suspect it’s the depleted uranium dust that is permeating
the city.

But the real impact of the first heavy use of depleted uranium
weaponry in populous urban environments (DU was used widely especially
in 2003 in Baghdad, Samara, Mosul and other big Iraqi cities), will
come over the years, as the toxic legacy of this latest American war
crime begins to show up in rising numbers of cancers, birth defects and
other genetic disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, as in the case of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the toxic
effects of this latest battlefield use of toxic materials by the US
military will also be felt for years to come by the men and women who
were sent over to fight America’s latest wars. As with Agent Orange,
the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department have been assiduously
denying the problem, and have been just as assiduously denying claims
by veterans of the Gulf War and the two current wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan who claim their cancers and other diseases have anything to
do with their exposure to DU.

The record on Agent Orange should lead us to be suspicious of the government’s claims.

The deformed and dead babies in Iraq should make us demand a
cleanup of Iraq and Afghanistan, medical aid for the victims, and a ban
on all depleted uranium weapons.
________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
work is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

"WE'RE SCREWED": TABLOID HEIST BLANKETS NEW YORK WITH TRUTH ON CLIMATE CHANGE

davidswanson — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:45:14 -0400

[Note: I contributed an article, my first ever published in the NY Post. --DS]

MEDIA HEIST BLANKETS CITY WITH "SPECIAL EDITION" NEW YORK POST
Tabloid Tells Truth About Climate Change and How It Will Affect City, World

Fake New York Post: http://www.nypost-se.com/
Video News Release: http://www.nypost-se.com/video
City report on climate change: http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/2009/NPCC_CRI.pdf
Wake-up call: http://www.tcktcktck.org/wakeup

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a "special edition" New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report.

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has "less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet," adding that Copenhagen is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

"This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem."

The fake Post's cover story ("We're Screwed") reports the frightening conclusions of a blue-ribbon panel of scientists commissioned by the mayor's office to determine the potential effects of climate change on the City. That report was released in February of this year, but received very little press at the time.
Other lead articles describe the Pentagon's alarmed response to global warming ("Clear & Present Disaster"), the U.S. government's sadly minuscule response to the crisis ("Congress Cops Out on Climate"), China's alternative energy program ("ChinaÕs Green Leap Forward Overtakes U.S."), and how if the US doesn't quickly pass a strong climate bill, the crucial Copenhagen climate talks this December could be a "Flopenhagen."

The paper includes original investigative reporting as well. One article ("Carbon counter counts New Yorkers as fools") reveals that Deutsche Bank - which erected a seven-story "carbon counter" in central Manhattan - not only invests heavily in coal-mining companies worldwide, but has recently entered the business of coal
trading itself.

The paper has the world's gloomiest weather page, covering the next 70 years rather than just 7 days. The "Around the World" section describes the disproportionate effects of climate change on poorer parts of the world, including extreme droughts, floods, famines, water shortages, mass migrations and conflicts. Developing countries will bear the brunt of climate change effects even though they have done very little to cause the problem.

But the paper isn't all doom and gloom. An article called "New York Fights Back" notes that the carbon emissions of Big Apple residents are only one third the national average, and that the city is building 1800 miles of bike paths, planting one million trees, and replacing its fleet of police cars with hybrids. There's also a page of black-humor cartoons (in one, Charlie Brown finds Snoopy drowned),
a gossip section that takes no prisoners, and a number of truly cheerful ads - for sex ("Awesome. No carbon emissions."), tote bags, bicycles, and tap water ("Literally comes right out of your faucet!").

Another ad promotes civil disobedience, encouraging readers to visit
http://BeyondTalk.net and pledge to risk arrest in a planned global action November 30, just before the conference in Copenhagen.

"We need strong action on climate change," said David Solnit of Mobilization for Climate Justice West, one of the partners in BeyondTalk.net. "But history shows that leaders act only when people take to the streets to demand it. That's what needs to happen now."

This paper is one of 2500 initiatives taking place in more than 130 countries as a response to the "Global Wake-up Call" on climate change. For more information, visit www.tcktcktck.org/wakeup

TVA Dumps Toxic Coal Ash in Poor Alabama Town

fast2write — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:42:10 -0400

UNIONTOWN, Ala. — The Rev. James R. Murdock sits on his porch with a view of the Arrowhead Landfill and wonders, watching the TVA coal ash train roll in. A cancer survivor, Murdock is anxious about the toxic and radioactive coal ash rolling into town. It contains at least 14 different chemicals and heavy metals, including arsenic and lead. There are ways to recycle some coal ash, like putting it in concrete. But experts say this particular coal ash is some of the most toxic ever generated as a byproduct of burning some of the dirtiest coal to ever be mined for electric power. It has been piling up in East Tennessee since the 1960s. A member of Congress from Huntsville, a doctor, recently testified it was as deadly as nuclear waste. Read the full story in The Locust Fork News-Journal...

Stop Complaining About Right-Wing Protests! The Left Should Be (Re)Learning How It's Done

dlindorff — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:50:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

OMG! Those protesters showing up at Democratic “town meetings” to
promote the president’s health care “reform” program are being bused in
from out of town?

Scandal! Que horrible! (Gasp)

But wait! That’s exactly what we on the left always did when we
held demonstrations—at least if we could. Who in the trade union
movement hasn’t called on fellow workers in other unions to join them
in rallies during struggles with an employer, or asked them to join
sparse picket-lines? Who hasn’t pulled out the stops trying to get
people from other cities to attend a local protest?

Okay, if it were shown that the Republicans were hiring
fake protesters to go to those Democratic pep rallies to mess them up,
as was done during the 2000 Florida vote recount, there’d be a good
investigative story, but from the righteous if ignorant anger that is
being expressed by the tea-baggers and anti-government types that I’ve
seen in news reports, these seem like legitimate right-wing cranks, who
are willing to be rallied to the cause of opposing what they see as a
socialist plot. Never mind that you’ve got ignorant numbskulls
demanding that Democrats in Congress “Keep your government hands off my
Medicare!” or that you’ve got right-wing protesters in their 70’s who
are all on Medicare irrationally shouting “Keep government out of
health care!” The point is that confused and ignorant or not, these
people are willing to make the effort to travel fair distances to make
their voices heard, and they’re willing to stand up, shout, and even
scuffle for the chance to make their point.

It’s not as if Democrats haven’t gone to great length to fill those same halls with earnest supporters.

The real question is why is the left in the US so goddamned polite
and domesticated that these Right Wing cranks look positively rowdy.

Back in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement
wasn’t polite and domesticated. It brought activists to events in the
Deep South all the way from New York and Boston. Its members rallied in
the thousands to shut down segregated public and even private
institutions. Its activists occupied buildings on university campuses,
boldly confronting police and police dogs and armed men in white robes.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-war protesters in turn shut
down recruiting and induction centers, destroyed draft board records,
tried to close down Washington, DC, got arrested in the hundreds,
incited soldiers to desert and then helped hide them from the law,
exposed the 1968 Democratic Convention as a farce, and faced down armed
police and soldiers repeatedly, at one point in 1970 closing down the
nation’s campuses in a national student strike when soldiers shot and
killed four unarmed students at Kent State University.

Years earlier, when workers were being abused, they occupied
factories, forcibly shutting them down with sit-down strikes, battled
Pinkerton detectives and armed National Guard forces, and set up tent
cities in Washington to make themselves heard.

And they won great victories.

Where is that passion today? For the most part, the left, in all its
various guises—environmentalists, labor unions, civil rights advocates,
health care reform advocates, anti-war activists—have become neutered
office-chair potatoes, sending canned emails to their elected
representatives or to the White House, occasionally marching politely
inside of pre-approved, permitted and police-prescribed routes, and
attending sponsored events like the current round of town meetings,
perhaps to raise polite objections to aspects of a proposed piece of
legislation.

The agenda of the left in today’s America is being written not by
uncompromising radicals in the street as in earlier decades of
struggle, but by the bought-and-paid Democrats in Washington. The left,
such as it is, has become simply a reactive force, trying to make
discrete little improvements in the truly horrible legislation—health
care “reform,” cap-and-trade, the Employee Not-So-Free Choice Act,
continued Iraq and Afghanistan War funding bills--that is being offered
by a wholly corrupt Washington in thrall to corporate lobbyists.

We all need to take a lesson from the Right, and from those lusty,
cantankerous folks who are raising hell at those pathetic “town
meetings.”

How can it be that 10 percent of American workers don’t have a job,
and that the government is expecting that number to keep rising for
another year or more, or that another 7 percent have either given up
even trying to find a job, or have taken part-time work in desperation,
and yet we have not had one mass protest in Washington demanding public
jobs for the jobless!

How can it be that the country has been mired in two wars now for
eight years, and we haven’t had a million people storming the Pentagon
to shut it down (or at least levitate it)!

How can it be that we have 49 million Americans who can’t even
afford to see a doctor when they’re sick, and we’re talking about a
health care “reform” plan that not only won’t fix the problem, but will
actually end up costing us all $600 billion over 10 years without
solving it! And we just write letters to Congress! Why aren’t we
liberating hospitals and opening them up to the uninsured?

How can it be that the ice cap at the North Pole is actually
disappearing, and the whole arctic tundra across Canada, Alaska and
Siberia is starting to boil with the release of prehistoric methane
trapped under now-melting permafrost, threatening the very lives of our
grandchildren, and we’re calmly watching as even the Obama
administration’s pathetic “cap-and-trade” legislation gets stalled by
coal-state Democrats! Why aren’t we on the left lying down on the
tracks to block the coal trains, or tearing up those tracks!

Where is the passion and commitment we once had?

It all seems to be on the Right these days.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Agent Orange Causes Media Blindness

dlindorff — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:35:34 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces
in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited
forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long
been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating
diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now
it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American
journalists.

This is demonstrably the case at the New York Times, where a report in Saturday’s edition on new Agent Orange links
being found to Parkinson’s Disease and ischemic heart disease noted
that it could lead to many more Vietnam War Era veterans being eligible
for disability benefits and treatment, but completely failed to mention
the significance of the discovery for the millions of Vietnamese who
were also exposed to the chemical—and for their descendants.

The new link was announced in a report by a 14-member committee of
the Institute of Medicine, which had been asked to determine what
conditions might be traced to exposure to the chemical that had been
“used to clear stretches of the jungle” in Vietnam. As the article
noted, since 1994, the Institute of Medicine has to date found 17
medical conditions that can be traced to exposure to Agent Orange, “13
of which qualify veterans for service-connected disability benefits.”

There’s a lot wrong with this article, as written by Times
reporter Janie Lorber (though admittedly we can’t know what is her
responsibility and what is the handiwork of the newspaper’s editors)...

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Congressman Perriello Proposes Green Energy

davidswanson — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:02:07 -0400

Unveiling a blueprint for the VA-5th to lead the nation in clean energy economy: http://tinyurl.com/ldmtvd

Sen. Specter Joins Dems, Puts Party on the Spot

dlindorff — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:00:45 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

For almost a generation, the Democrats in Congress have been able
to pretend to be the party of ordinary working people, the party of
progressives, and the inheritor of the mantel of Franklin Roosevelt and
the New Deal, all the while doing little of substance and catering
primarily to the interests of Wall Street and the nation’s corporate
interests.

The Democrats managed this sleight of hand for so long by claiming
that while they had the best of intentions, reality, in the form of
their inability to pass legislation, even when they were in the
majority in both houses of Congress, that could avoid being
filibustered to death by a Republican minority.

That situation has continued to this day, with the party currently having 58 seats in the Senate.

It appears likely that Al Franken has won his tight race defeating
former Sen. Norm Coleman in Minnesota, with the contest all over but
the shouting. (A 3-judge state panel already found Franken to be ahead
by 312 votes, with no outstanding issues in the count, and public
opinion in the state widely favors Coleman finally conceding.)

And now comes the changeling Arlen Specter, the onetime Democratic
district attorney of Philadelphia, who switched to a Republican to run
for the US Senate and has held that state’s senior senator position now
for 29 years. But facing likely defeat from the right in a Republican
primary for his party’s nomination by a conservative challenger who
almost knocked him off last time around, Specter has finally faced
reality: In a state that has been moving steadily into the Democratic
column for years, his future is with the Democrats.

With Specter switching his party affiliation to Democrat, the
Democrats will finally have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the
Senate, and an already solid majority in the House.

There will, at that point, be no more excuse for Democrats to duck
progressive, liberal, pro-worker, pro-ordinary person issues, using
their old-standby excuse of needing to compromise and win over
Republican votes. There won’t even be any need to cater to party
turncoat Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) to get things done.

So the way I see it, it’s time for progressives, for the union
movement, for the peace movement, for the environmentalist movement,
the single-payer health care reform movement, indeed for all
progressive elements in the US, to pour on the pressure to get Congress
and President Obama to pass real, progressive legislation in this
Congress.

`We don’t need no effin “bipartisanship” anymore.

Now granted, not all Democrats are progressive, but getting
Democrats on board for issues like overriding a filibuster attempt is
different from getting Democrats to vote for a particular bill. The
party leaders have plenty of leverage in the form of control over the
moving forward of members’ bills, of committee assignments, office
assignments, etc., to get members of the caucus to line up on
procedural votes like terminating a filibuster, if they want to use them.

And of course, that’s where the pressure comes in. No longer can
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) claim that they are hamstrung by the need to win over Republican
members to their side. If they don’t use their caucus power to control
their own members, they will stand exposed as fake liberals, and fake
advocates of ordinary Americans. They will stand exposed as agents of
the corporatocracy.

Maybe that’s what they want, but I don’t think the party will survive that kind of exposure.

So let’s get moving. We can start with renewed pressure for
single-payer healthcare reform, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act
and a real end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are litmus
test issues for progressives and will let us know if the Democrats are
going to keep being the other corporate party, or are going to be a
real liberal alternative.

The Employee Free Choice Act will be an interesting one to watch in
Specter’s case. Specter, who has long enjoyed union backing in
Pennsylvania, a few weeks ago said that after earlier backing the
measure he was now not going to support it. But that was when he was
facing a bitter Republican primary. Now he has to earn his spurs as a
prodigal Democrat, returned to the fold. Unions in Pennsylvania are
going to put heavy pressure on him to back the measure if he wants to
avoid a primary now in the Democratic Party for nomination as its
candidate for Senate next year.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Liveblogging Politico Forum on Climate Change at Starbucks on Capitol Hill

davidswanson — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:10:23 -0400

7:10 p.m. ET on Thursday: Mindy Lubber from CERES is one of the speakers, formerly at EPA; also Brad Figel global director of govt. affairs for Nike formerly at Senate finance committee (holding up a "sustainable shoe" and supposedly wanting to push Congress to pass "meaningful" climate legislation this year); (Rep. John Dingell seems to be late).

7:15 Lubber wants to address global warming right away, says "financial leaders" want this, just like Greenpeace and that sort of group. Building a green economy, Lubber says, is answer to environment and economy. I agree with all of this, but there are no details on desirable legislation or citizen action. I doubt anyone in the room COULD POSSIBLY disagree with anything said, with the possible exception of the claim that a sneaker is sustainable.

7:20 Figel is selling more shoes: they now use a non-greenhouse gas for "air cushions" in shoes.

7:22 Lubber likes Waxman's climate bill. She doesn't want the US to show up in Copenhagen without having passed it. She wants a strong bill and soon. Asked about the wisdom of waiting and doing a stronger bill after Copenhagen, she said our hands would be tied in Copenhagen if we don't pass a bill first. This seems to parallel Obama's claim that he can't agree to anything in Copenhagen unless Congress pre-approves a treaty (which is a weird twist on his acceptance of an Iraq treaty made without Congress and his signing-statement claim on treaty power).

7:25 Nike, Gap, Ebay, and lots of other companies listed as the good guys on this. They want Congress to act now.

7:30 No Q&A. Panelists done and off stage. Congressman Dingell now being introduced: has been in Congress since 1955. His wife is here too.

7:33 Politico questioner, Mike Allen I think, asks about healthcare. Dingell says his dad introduced first bill on medicare, but nothing happened until Pres Johnson. Thought that Medicare in '65 would lead to step 2: national health insurance. But no, nothing serious until Clinton. Clinton let Ira Magaziner lead it, which didn't help. Bill didn't come up for months, and insurance company ads were all over tv. But we need it done now for health and economic reasons. The fiercest enemies are fewer now, Dingell says. But note that Dingell has not cosponsored HR 676 and for no apparent reason he just said what a great president Obama is. So, what is he talking about? The "Massachusetts plan"?

7:43 Now Allen turns to climate change. Dingell says we need a shift away from oil for financial as well as environmental reasons. Wants to "do something." Mentions US Cap. Ran out of time last congress to pass a bill. Dingell supports Waxman-Markey bill. But no details on it. When asked to distinguish a serious from a gradual bill, he declines.

7:51 Now Allen is reading pre-submitted audience questions from cards, so I may not get to ask why he's not signed onto HR 676.

I think I'll split.