The Afghan War may now doom our ability both to cope with the global climate crisis and to fairly deliver health care in this country.

If Barack Obama announces an escalation, Copenhagen and the Climate Bill will become meaningless. And the prospects for a single-payer health care system or even a token public option will disappear.

At 11pm Tuesday, December 1---after Obama's speech---we in central Ohio will gather at the Federal Building to either celebrate Obama’s courageous decision against escalation, or to inaugurate what will certainly be hard years of bitter civil struggle against yet another senseless war. Freepress.org, Solartopia.org and other peace, green and social justice organizations ask others around the world to consider joining us in your own home towns.

If there is no escalation, we can celebrate a small step forward in Copenhagen, where Obama has said he will join with Chinese leadership in a 17% reduction in carbon emissions. Joining with the Chinese in setting ANY target is good global politics.

But this is nowhere near enough. Nor is it anywhere near what’s possible.

In the spirit of Buy Nothing Day--Nov. 27 in North America and Nov. 28 in other parts of the world--the Columbus Free Press talks with Bill Talen, in the wake of his Green Party run for Mayor of New York City. Most people know him as Reverend Billy, the televangelist-styled street preacher fighting for more than 10 years now to help us cast off the demons of hyper-consumerism !

With his blond pompadour and bullhorn, he has led protests against Starbucks, and the Disney Store, while also flamboyantly opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the gentrification of neighborhoods, and the eviction of families from their homes during the recent foreclosure crisis.

In 2006 Rev. Billy came to Columbus Ohio with his Stop Shopping Gospel Choir to help with the successful campaign to get the lingerie company Victoria’s Secret to use more environmentally and socially responsible ways for making their catalogues. He is the subject of producer Morgan Spurlock’s 2007 film What Would Jesus Buy?

Columbus Free Press: What are your ideas about Buy Nothing Day. You got a lot of experience with it.

Like scores of journalists, I attentively listened as Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong delivering his closing remarks, and for the last time answering journalists’ questions. It was the conclusion of 17th Apec Economies Leaders’ Meeting in Singapore, on November 15, and Prime Minister Lee was clearly tired, although unruffled.

Mr. Lee is an impressive man. He has a commanding presence and is very articulate, despite his soft poise and humble demeanor. He speaks with the confidence of a leader of a great nation, not an island city-state, the smallest nation in Southeast Asia. In fact, Lee’s confidence is well earned, and greatly deserved, and, by any reasonable standards Singapore is indeed a great nation. His country, once a site of a small fishing village, which saw a most tumultuous history of hardship, occupation and war, is now a prosperous nation, economically notwithstanding; its GDP per capital makes it the fifth wealthiest country in the world. Singapore’s official reserve is estimated at more than US $170 billion. For a country of 4-5 million people, it isn’t too bad.

This is what I know;

The worst exposure was 16 millirems of radiation. 6 millirems is a chest Xray. The normal exposure over 365 days or one yr for employees at any nuclear power plant is 2000 millirems.

Now, PA has 20 Nuclear Power Plants, all of them leaking tritium w/o licensees and getting away with it. All of them are subject to about the same leaks during repairs. Unit 2 has been shut down at TMI and is regulated through a dummie fedral corp that Excelon has that leases it to oversee the "management of regulating the already damaged unit' which is fancy for legal papers that make it legal to continue practice of work at TMI.

U.S. government hypocrisy has grown so pervasive over the last decades that it provokes yawns and glazed looks. Senators denounce government interference in health care while partaking in their own top of the line government health insurance that they designed – at taxpayer expense. Secretary of State Clinton demanded Pakistani leaders remove terrorists from their streets while self-proclaimed anti-Castro terrorists parade down Miami’s thoroughfares – as freedom fighters, of course.

Duplicity in language coincides with stupidity of policy. In Afghanistan (which costs a million dollars per year per soldier to keep Hamid Karzai in the president business), U.S. and NATO troops pursue a vague anti-terror mission in which they have caused immense death and destruction -- with few or no results. “Send more troops to fight for the Karzai government,” scream John McCain and his ilk, while Karzai vies for a place in the Guinness Book of Records for corruption. He retains legitimacy among those who benefit directly from his theft – and the U.S. government.