As radiation poured from 3 Mile Island 31 years ago this weekend, utility executives rested easy.

They knew that no matter how many people their errant nuke killed, and no matter how much property it destroyed, they would not be held liable.

Today this same class of executives demands untold taxpayer billions to build still more TMIs. No matter how many meltdowns they cause, and how much havoc they visit down on the public, they still believe they’re above the law.

Fueled with more than $600 million public relations slush money, they demand a risk-free "renaissance" financed by you and yours.

AS IF!

In 1980 I reported from central Pennsylvania on the dead and dying one year after. Dozens of interviews documented a horrifying range of radiation-related diseases including cancer, leukemia, birth defects, still births, malformations, sterility, heart attacks, strokes, emphysema, skin lesions, hair loss, a metallic taste and much more. As reported by the Baltimore News-American among others, such ailments also ripped through the animal population.

“Everything feels obscene,” a friend said seven years ago, when we carpet-bombed Baghdad, launching the invasion. It still does, but in a dull, chronic, “used to it” way — outrage mixed, these last few years, with “hope,” smearing the war effort with a thick, national ambivalence.

Is it still going on? Well, yeah, with a grinding pointlessness that’s not worth talking about or even debating anymore. The smorgasbord of justifications has been permanently shut down: the 9/11 tie-in, the WMD, “another Munich,” democracy for the Middle East. No one’s hawking Freedom Fries anymore. The war in Iraq simply continues because a war in motion, especially when it’s not really a war, when there isn’t an enemy with whom to negotiate, is incapable of just, you know, stopping. When we don’t really have a mission, completing it is difficult indeed.

So I find myself witnessing the seven-year anniversary in a state of private grief, chewing bitterly on the limits of politics. Whatever slow, cautious change President Obama believes in at the deepest level of his political soul, he can only attempt to conjure it out of politics as usual.

WASHINGTON, D.C. Between the output of existing commercial nuclear reactors and 21 proposed nuclear reactors covered by agreements quietly signed by the outgoing Bush Administration with more than a dozen electric utilities, the United States already has agreed to store enough spent (used) reactor fuel to fill the equivalent of not one, but two, Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repositories, according to documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Given that the U.S. is back to square one for the first repository, U.S. taxpayers would be on the hook for potentially tens of billions of dollars in penalties that would have to be paid to utilities if the 21 proposed reactor projects proceed.

The world is sliding into climate crisis and at the center is one of the world’s most destructive projects - The Alberta Tar Sands. As other sources of oil dry up, major oil companies, banks, investors and top US corporations are pouring billions of dollars into Tar Sands development.
Tar Sands oil, also known as ‘heavy crude’ actually produces more the twice the amount greenhouse gas emissions per barrel than regular crude oil. Front line communities on both sides of the US / Canada boarder are facing the direct impacts of this massive environmental injustice. Cancer rates are on the rise in both First Nations communities living near the Tar Sands extraction cite as well as in low-income communities, mostly communities of color in the U.S. who live next to oil refineries that are expanding to process the new Tar Sands oil.

‘We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan where I live. We are convinced that these cancers are linked to the Tar Sands development on our doorstep. It is shortening our lives. That’s why we no longer call it “dirty oil” but “bloody oil”.’ George Poitras, a former chief of Mikisew Cree First Nation

The political events and comments surrounding Joe Biden’s recent visit to Israel stand only to highlight the hypocrisy and arrogant ignorance of the United States command. There are two factors here: first is the avoidance - in spite of superficial appearances - of the UN security council; and secondly - again in spite of superficial appearances - that the U.S. military command is concerned about the welfare of their troops in the Middle East because of the Israeli situation.

As most followers of the news are aware, the Israelis announced plans to construct another 1600 settlement units in the Jerusalem area. They did this in the face of Biden who at the time was meeting with Netanyahu concerning the rebooting of the “peace process.” The main purpose of the “peace process” - at least for the Israelis - is to be able to establish communities - “facts” - on the ground so that if they ever did finally get to some form of settlement, imposed or negotiated, the inarguable facts would severely limit what could be negotiated as far as independent, sovereign, and contiguous territory for Palestine is concerned.