On March 28,2002, the Sierra Club filed a 60-Day Notice of Intent to Sue the City of Columbus for its illegal sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs). SSOs are where raw sewage flows into basements, streets and streams. They have been illegal since the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.

· Columbus has had over 10,000 reported sewage backups into basements in the last 5 years. The city routinely denies responsibility, when in most instances they are at fault. Columbus also refuses to pay damages, telling people to sue. The Sierra Club believes there are many unreported backups, since many people do not know they can report, and others give up reporting after getting no restitution from the city previously. Some backups have caused tens of thousands of dollars of damages to individual homes.

· Columbus has at least 106 monitored sanitary sewer overflows. These are illegal, but are tracked and reported, at least part of the time. Under the Clean Water Act, the city could be fined $25,000 for each location for each day of overflow. Reported overflows in the last 5 years add up to fines of over $2 million.

Come work and learn on our diverse educational farm. Stipend and possible housing for committed, energetic people who love good food and growing it. Call Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware, OH. 740-363-2548.

The right is whining. Carl Limbacher and his crew complain on the popular NewsMax site that in the two weeks since the Harken story went critical, "the prestige press" (Limbacher's odd phrase, which presumably means he's excluding The National Enquirer) has given the affair 50 times more coverage than it gave the Whitewater deal after the New York Times broke that story on March 8, 1992.

Limbacher moans that Whitewater showed up only 14 times in the wake of the Times story, while from June 28 to July 12 of this year, there have been over 700 stories on the Harken sale.

C'mon, Carl. The reason Whitewater got off to a slow start was because for months, no one could figure out what the New York Times's Jeff Gerth was writing about. Reading any Gerth story is like bicycling through wet sand, but in the case of Whitewater, he surpassed himself. As readers sank up to their armpits in the sludge of Gerth-prose, interest in Whitewater for that electoral year flickered and died. Gerth saved Clinton's ass. Ultimately, Whitewater did make it into the headlines, but in truth, it always lacked sex appeal. There just wasn't that much meat in the stew. Not

Just about every politician and pundit is eager to denounce wrongdoing in business these days. Sinners have defiled the holy quest for a high rate of return. Damn those who left devoted investors standing bereft at corporate altars!

On the surface, media outlets are filled with condemnations of avarice. The July 15 edition of Newsweek features a story headlined "Going After Greed," complete with a full-page picture of George W. Bush's anguished face. But after multibillion-dollar debacles from Enron to WorldCom, the usual media messages are actually quite equivocal -- wailing about greedy CEOs while piping in a kind of hallelujah chorus to affirm the sanctity of the economic system that empowered them.

At a Wall Street pulpit, Bush declared that America needs business leaders "who know the difference between ambition and destructive greed." Presumably, other types of greed are fine and dandy.

During his much-ballyhooed speech, the president asserted that "all investment is an act of faith." With that spirit, a righteous form of business fundamentalism is firmly in place. The great god of capitalism is

It's an all-too-rare pleasure to see the nuclear industry sweat, but in the run-down to the wire, there were clear signs of panic in the campaign to push through the U.S. senate a plan to ship the nation's commercial nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain outside Las Vegas.

When Bush came to power, the nuke lobby thought they had it made. The days of competition between the oil industry and the nuclear lobby are long gone. Now they all belong to the same conglomerate. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, perhaps the only member of the cabinet who requires a more simplified briefing book than Bush, was an old industry pal, long since bought and paid for.

Bush himself called for more subsidies to nuclear power and reversed his election-eve opposition to the nuke industry's most fervent dream: the Yucca Mountain dump for nuclear waste from around the country, hauled in by rail. September 11 changed all that. Not immediately, mind you. But as the patriotic hysteria, in which it was deemed un-American to question any Bush proposal, began to subside, people began to conclude that the scheme to truck 77,000 tons of radioactive waste through their