War Made Invisible – How America Hides the Human Toll or Its Military Machine
Recent Articles:
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- House Democrats are finally shifting on Israel. Party leaders must listen
- Politicians Should Stop Hiding Behind the “Two-State Solution” Fantasy
- Today’s cautious AOC would not have endorsed the AOC of 2018
- My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump
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Running for Congress
Norman Solomon — the North Bay political activist who has been a leader of the region’s Green New Deal commission and the national Healthcare Not Warfare campaign — announced on Wednesday (April 13) that he has filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for Congress. He said that his name will be on the June 2012 ballot if Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey decides not to seek re-election.
“After so many years of progressive leadership from Lynn Woolsey, her successor in the House should have a proven commitment to a wide range of progressive values,” Solomon said. “Whether the issue is war in Afghanistan, massive giveaways to Wall Street, chronic deference to corporate power or Washington’s failure to take drastic action against climate change, the North Bay should be represented in Congress by someone with extensive knowledge and a track record of strong public advocacy on key local, national and international issues.”
“I’ve spent decades working for social justice, environmental protection and a rational foreign policy,” Solomon said. “I see Congress as a place where strong progressive voices must be heard and basic changes must be fought for.”
To read more, click here.
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“Mad as hell, with a sense of humor”
With her usual precision, Molly Ivins commented: “If Will Rogers and Mother Jones had a baby, Jim Hightower would be that rambunctious child — mad as hell, with a sense of humor.”
Jim is the real deal – a progressive populist so compelling that he was chosen to be the finale guest on the intrepid PBS program “Bill Moyers Journal.”
I’m proud that Jim Hightower is making a special trip to California to speak in support of my emerging campaign for Congress.
To read more, please click here.
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The Need for Truth About Nuclear Dangers
By Norman Solomon
On the edge of Capitol Hill, day after day, we heard wrenching testimony from people whose lives had been ravaged by the split atom.
That was three decades ago.
I was coordinating the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims in 1980, one year after Three Mile Island. The voices came from uranium miners, atomic workers, veterans, downwinders exposed to atmospheric nuclear bomb tests . . . and many others. The people who testified were from a wide array of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. But in addition to radiation exposure and suffering, they had one huge experience in common.
They'd been lied to—not once or twice, but repeatedly. Year after year.
There is no danger, the officials told them. You are safe. Radiation levels? Not to worry. But gradually, the clusters of cancer or leukemia or severe thyroid ailments or birth defects became too conspicuous to ignore. Still, officials kept saying that the nuclear industry was blameless.
To read the complete article, click here.
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On Speaking Truth to Nuclear Power
The other night, as news from Japan took a turn for the worse, I stayed up late and wrote about Nuclear Power Madness. I hope you'll read the article and pass it on.My opposition to nuclear power is longstanding. In the late 1970s, while advocating for solar and wind energy as well as conservation, I devoted two years to public education and nonviolent civil disobedience that aimed to shut down a large nuclear power plant operating just forty miles from Portland, Oregon.Later, I served as director of the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims and co-authored Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation. (The book is now online; if you'd like to take a peek, click here.)Despite the latest in a long line of presidential assurances, the nuclear facts are dire. As the director of Public Citizen's Energy Program wrote this week, "There are alternatives. Had Japan invested in rooftop solar and wind turbines to the degree it spent maintaining and building nuclear reactors, the country wouldn't be grappling with the potential of a full-scale nuclear meltdown."The ominous power of the nuclear industry extends from Sacramento to Washington, D.C., where an atomic lobbying force throws buckets of money at Capitol Hill.
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Nuclear Power Madness
Published on Monday, March 14, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Like every other president since the 1940s, Barack Obama has promoted nuclear power. Now, with reactors melting down in Japan, the official stance is more disconnected from reality than ever.
Political elites are still clinging to the oxymoron of “safe nuclear power.” It’s up to us — people around the world — to peacefully and insistently shut those plants down.
There is no more techno-advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power is not safe there, and it is not safe anywhere.
As the New York Times reported on Monday, “most of the nuclear plants in the United States share some or all of the risk factors that played a role at Fukushima Daiichi: locations on tsunami-prone coastlines or near earthquake faults, aging plants and backup electrical systems that rely on diesel generators and batteries that could fail in extreme circumstances.”
Nuclear power — from uranium mining to fuel fabrication to reactor operations to nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years — is, in fact, a moral crime against future generations.
But syrupy rhetoric has always marinated the nuclear age. From the outset — even as radioactive ashes were still hot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — top officials in Washington touted atomic energy as redemptive. The split atom, we were to believe, could be an elevating marvel.
President Dwight Eisenhower pledged “to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma” by showing that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”
Even after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 — and now this catastrophe in Japan — the corporate theologians of nuclear faith have continued to bless their own divine projects.
Thirty years ago, when I coordinated the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims on the edge of Capitol Hill, we heard grim testimony from nuclear scientists, workers, downwinders and many others whose lives had been forever ravaged by the split atom. Routine in the process was tag-team deception from government agencies and nuclear-invested companies.
By 1980, generations had already suffered a vast array of terrible consequences — including cancer, leukemia and genetic injuries — from a nuclear fuel cycle shared by the “peaceful” and military atom. Today, we know a lot more about the abrupt and slow-moving horrors of the nuclear industry.
<< To read the rest of this article, click here. >>
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Crisis for Working People: The New Corporate Assault
To listen to Norman Solomon's Feb. 22 interview on C-SPAN Radio, click here.
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To visit the website of the Norman Solomon for Congress Committee…
Click here for the Norman Solomon for Congress Committee.
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Update — “Toward a Greening of Politics”
For a while now, I've been hearing questions like: "Sure you want to jump into that cesspool?"
I answered with a short essay — "Toward a Greening of Politics" — in the current issue of the North Bay Bohemian. To read it, click here.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Bay Guardian printed another piece I wrote on some of the key reasons I'm planning to run for Congress if Lynn Woolsey decides not to seek re-election. For that article, click here.
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Toward a Greening of Politics
North Bay Bohemian — Jan. 26, 2011
By Norman Solomon
"Sure you want to jump into that cesspool?"
I've heard countless variations of the same question in recent months, as the possibility of running for Congress has become more real. With all the big-money hit pieces and mud fights that pass for "politics" these days, no wonder so many people see election campaigns as little more than depravity masquerading as democracy.
But there are lives in the balance, near and far, from the North Bay to Afghanistan. A list of what's at stake would be endless: the rights of workers, the ecology of rivers and the injustices of a healthcare system largely run for corporate profit.And with the U.S. military now spending more than $2 billion every day, grim results of what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the madness of military" are all around us. Public schools hold bake sales while Pentagon spending continues to go through the roof.
At a time when budget cuts are having dire effects on our own communities, I think of the distorted priorities that I saw in 2009 during a visit to Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. That nation, in desperate need, does not need Uncle Sam to escalate warfare.
Here at home, an upsurge of hope peaked a couple of years ago with the inauguration of President Obama. Since then, we've come back to earth—which, in the long run, is where we should be—with feet on the ground and eyes on the horizon. Pragmatism and idealism can be a very good match.
To read complete article, click here.