America’s Nuclear Downwinders Deserve Justice

by Aspen Coriz-Romero and Anila Lopez Marks

 August 23, 2024
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Map Source: United States Army – Public Domain

It’s been nearly 80 years since the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico. Communities have been reeling ever since.

For generations, Americans who live “downwind” of nuclear testing and development sites have suffered deadly health complications. And this summer, funding for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) expired, putting their hard-earned compensation at risk.

Coming alongside sky-high spending on nuclear weapons development, this lapse is an outrage. Funding for these communities, which span much of the country, should be not only restored but expanded.

Alongside New Mexicans, people in Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Utah, and beyond have suffered health complications from nuclear testing in Nevada. And fallout from decades of tests ravaged the Marshall Islands, which were occupied by the U.S. after World War II.

Communities in Colorado were exposed to radiation from the Rocky Flats weapons plant. And people in Coldwater Creek, Missouri were exposed when World War II-era nuclear waste was buried there.

Over the generations since, tens of thousands of people have been affected. Health impacts include respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, birth defects, and elevated rates of cancer.

We’re from New Mexico, the only “cradle-to-grave” state in which all steps of the nuclear production process — mining, testing, and disposal — occur together. We’ve lived near impacted communities our entire lives.

Tina Cordova, co-founder of New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, says five generations of her family have suffered health and economic impacts from nuclear testing. “We are forced to bury our loved ones on a regular basis,” she said.

Uranium mining in the Navajo Nation has also taken a terrible toll. Between 1944 and 1986, 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo land. Indigenous miners were exposed to radiation without proper safety protocols, resulting in aggressive cancers, miscarriages, lung diseases, and other illnesses.

After decades of struggle to get compensation, communities impacted by nuclear weapons development finally won passage of RECA in 1990 — 45 years after the first atomic bomb was dropped.

The initial law provided $2.6 billion to around 41,000 individuals, limiting coverage to onsite participants and downwinders within designated areas of the Nevada Test Site. The bill was amended in 2000 to include those who contracted cancer or other specific diseases from working as uranium miners between 1942 and 1971.

Since then, there have been bipartisan efforts to expand the bill’s narrow scope to other impacted communities. In response to years of advocacy, an extended and expanded version of RECA successfully passed the Senate this spring with 69-30 in favor — and President Biden’s backing.

The bill would have expanded RECA eligibility to all downwinders in Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, and Guam, along with previously excluded areas of Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. And it would have included miners exposed to radiation until 1990.

But Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson blocked a vote in the House, abandoning the unseen victims of the U.S. nuclear arms race. Now RECA has expired altogether.

It’s not for lack of money. The U.S. is projected to spend over $750 billion on nuclear weapons over the next decade — a fact it feels impossible to reconcile with the abandonment of the people affected by that spending.

Meanwhile, people are still being exposed to radiation.

Even now, 523 abandoned uranium mines containing waste piles remain on Navajo territory — and companies continue to haul uranium through Navajo land, despite a nearly two-decade old ban on uranium mining there.

Mismanagement of nuclear waste is another ongoing concern. In 2019, 250 barrels of waste were lost en route to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

To protect future generations — and our own — the ultimate goal should be an end to all nuclear weapons development. But as we work toward that goal, repairing the harm to impacted communities — by renewing and expanding RECA — is a necessary next step.

Aspen Coriz-Romero is a New Mexico Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies from Española, New Mexico. Anila Lopez Marks is an IPS Henry A. Wallace Fellow from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Economic War with China is a Losing Proposition

by Eve Ottenberg

 August 23, 2024Facebook

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Photo by Li Yang

It’s always better to do business with people than to pick fights with them. But this piece of common sense seems to have dropped out of the brains – if they have them – of American congressional and white house leaders. During his presidential tenure, Donald “The Tariff Man” Trump slapped tariffs on washing machines, aluminum, steel, solar panels and other goods, totaling $380 billion worth of trade from China, the U.S.’s third biggest trading partner. That amounted to a tax increase of $80 billion. Not to be outdone in the stupidity sweepstakes, Joe “Copycat” Biden added his tariffs. They affected batteries, steel, aluminum, semiconductors, solar cells, electric vehicles, critical minerals and more.

As election campaigns kicked off, the candidates outdid each other on who could be tougher on China economically. Let’s hope Kamala “Advised by Black Rock” Harris eschews these idiotic soundbites. They do nothing besides offend Beijing. And you don’t want to offend Beijing. It is America’s second biggest creditor, and when Washington’s rulers make hostile, Sinophobic noises, Beijing dumps U.S. Treasuries. Other countries follow suit. This, while treasury secretary Janet Yellen already has her hands full, trying to unearth buyers for American debt. She doesn’t need, China, Saudi Arabia and who knows who else ditching billions of dollars worth of USTs.

And that’s merely finance and taxes. Just as bad, maybe worse, are all the economic prohibitions the last two administrations have slapped on trade. Biden sez no chips to China. Well, that boomeranged fast. China boosted a homegrown chip industry and it just had a huge breakthrough: Huawei’s Mate 60 smartphone features a seven-nanometer chipset. The manufacturer, SMIC, “achieved seven nanometers in two years from the conventional fourteen nanometers without access to foreign technology,” reported Foreign Policy Research Institute June 28. So China is well on the way to semi-conductor self-sufficiency, which will “alter the global chip supply chain and raise geopolitical security concerns…” Nothing like sanctions and tariffs to make America Third-Rate Again.

And they backfire in lots of ways. Again, take Biden’s semiconductor sanctions against China. Back in July 2023, Beijing struck back: it announced export controls on two rare earth minerals, gallium and germanium, indispensable for U.S. satellites, semiconductors and solar cells. Given that China has 60 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth minerals, with the other 40 percent in locations of dubious accessibility, Beijing’s move alarmed ceos at American tech corporations, who feared they portended more to come.

In fact, honchos at Nvidia and Intel begged the Biden bumblers to ease semiconductor sanctions against China. But it was too late, according to Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group. These idiotic sanctions already made American companies lose billions. “Chinese semiconductor companies have emerged. China won’t trust U.S. politics again, so will buy domestic. Biden shot the U.S. in the leg.” More recently, Beijing announced “export limits on antimony and related elements due to national security concerns,” the Sirius Report tweeted August 15. “Antimony is used in military applications such as ammunition, infrared missiles, nuclear weapons and photovoltaic equipment etc. etc.” Washington sanctions Beijing and gets sanctioned in return. Brilliant move on the part of a nation, namely the U.S., utterly dependent on foreign supplies of parts, minerals and just about anything else you can think of.

Given how interdependent Chinese and American economies are, this prolonged white house attempt to decouple them resembles a surgeon using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel: it’s disastrous. Take soybeans. The U.S. is the world’s biggest soybean producer and China the biggest soybean consumer. But the U.S. has lost the Chinese market due to the foolish American trade war, which helped shift China to buying soybeans from Latin America. At the higher end of trade products, consider the U.S. ban on Chinese software in autonomous cars. Developing these vehicles relies on global cooperation, Sputnik reported August 6, “as the sector has a relatively large ecosystem and high costs for research and development.” But team Biden aims to propose a rule prohibiting “Chinese software in vehicles in the U.S. with level 3 automation and above and effectively ban testing on U.S. roads of autonomous vehicles produced by Chinese companies.” And that ain’t all.

Vehicles with “Chinese-developed wireless communication” would be booted off U.S. highways, and their producers were compelled to prove that “none of their connected vehicles or advanced autonomous vehicle software was developed in a ‘foreign entity of concern,’ like China.” This proposed ban is all of a piece with Biden’s trade policies. Indeed, less than three months ago, the mega-minds in the white house decided on more tariffs on Chinese EVs.

So these Beltway geniuses insist on their dangerous tariffs (which cost Americans a fortune), sanctions and other prohibitions, which get us nowhere. Remember “the ruble will be rubble”? Well, it wasn’t. It’s doing great, and so’s the Russian economy, which is now ranked fourth richest in the world. Sanctions and stealing foreign financial assets don’t work. All they do is convince foreign money managers to flee U.S. banks – and the dollar, which ultimately hurts Americans. But hey, since when did Washington sachems ever factor pain for Americans into their calculations? Never forget the financial policies of Barack “Evict the Homeowners” Obama.

Unfortunately, there’s no end in sight to this Inside the Beltway imbecility regarding China. Former Trump national security advisor Robert O’Brien pontificated back in June that if reelected, Trump should cut all economic ties with China. For good measure, O’Brien added, in a Foreign Affairs article June 18, that Trump should start live nuclear-weapons testing and ponder deploying ALL marines to Asia. “As China seeks to undermine American economic and military strength, Washington should return the favor…should in fact, seek to decouple its economy from China’s,” O’Brien wrote. According to the Taipei Times June 19, O’Brien claims to be in “regular contact” with Trump and “O’Brien gave a copy [of the Foreign Affairs article] to Trump campaign adviser Susan Wiles.” She reportedly showed it to Trump, but this was denied by his campaign. This was a wise move: ramping up military and economic hostilities with yet another country, that is, China, is not a winning campaign platform.

Specifically, O’Brien urged “that the 60 percent tariffs on China that Trump has floated should only be the first step, followed by tougher export controls ‘on any technology that might be of use to China…’” Because that’s gone so well lately. Those export controls, aka sanctions, have hiked homegrown tech industries in China, thrown Beijing and Moscow into an economic, political and military embrace and made American industries,’ including weapons producers’ reliance on global supply chains very dicey.

Not that I’m complaining: if Lockheed Martin can’t obtain needed parts or software from China due solely to moves by the Einsteins in Washington, that’s fewer bombs and guns in the world and fewer corpses in places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the far East and Africa. But these moronic policies don’t just affect armaments production. They damage all sorts of industries on which ordinary people depend. Like it or not, the world is economically interwoven, and it is the height of folly to burn these global bridges without even a scintilla of a plan for kick-starting homegrown industries. And there’s no plan, because such industries ain’t happening, for the simple reason that that doesn’t interest our oligarchs.

American corporate overlords like cheap wages in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam, Mexico and, yes, China. They have no intention of spending money to plant new industries in the U.S., whose workers might unionize, or already be unionized and thus threaten the wealth on which their aristocratic privilege rests. Until political bigwigs start talking about how we’ll re-industrialize here in America, all these insults aimed at Beijing are worse than hot air: they’re economic suicide.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Busybody. She can be reached at her website.

 

Apologists for Rape: The Sde Teiman Protests

by Binoy Kampmark / August 22nd, 2024

In 2007, the writer Tal Nitsán isolated instances where Israeli male combatants systematically used sexual violence against Palestinian women to the war of 1948.  In essentially marking off such conduct from more contemporary practices, she relied on media accounts, archival sources, the reports of human rights organisations and the testimony of 25 Israeli reserve male soldiers.

Seven years later, the American feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, following a lecture in Israel in 2014, had this to say: “I spoke to Palestinian women, and they testified that there are no attacks of rape by Israeli soldiers.  And that, again, is an interesting question we should address: Why do men not rape in conflicts or war?  And if it doesn’t happen, why doesn’t it happen.”

A revision of such questions is long overdue and should include the current treatment by Israeli forces of Palestinian males held in custody, not to mention their strident defenders.  On the night of July 29, hundreds of right-wing Israeli activists gathered outside the Beit Lid army base.  Notably present was a group of oppressively masked soldiers, identifiable by the insignia of a snake in the Star of David, usually sported by Force 100.  Force 100 was created in the aftermath of the First Intifada, an IDF unit tasked with the express role of keeping Palestinian detainees in check and suppressing revolt in military prisons.

The unit was also involved in a violent disruption at the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert, where detained Palestinians from the Gaza Strip had been subjected to various forms of torture and maltreatment.  The detention facility at the base had been created in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks to accommodate some 120 Hamas militants, members of the Nukhba military wing and various Palestinian civilians.  Over time, the numbers from the Gaza Strip swelled by over 4,500 people.

It did not take long for grim accounts, available in both Israeli and foreign press outlets, noting instances of starvation, beatings and torture.  The field hospital established near the site also featured allegations of brutality against patients.  In June, it was revealed that the IDF was investigating the deaths of 36 detainees, vaguely attributing them to ongoing hostilities.

A number of Israeli non-government organisations filed an appeal with Israel’s Supreme Court seeking closure of the Sde Teiman facility, with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel arguing that the “egregious violations at Sde Teiman make depriving these people of liberty blatantly unconstitutional”.  With matters rapidly getting out of hand for IDF officials, hundreds of prisoners were transferred to the Ofer Prison located in the West Baak, and Ktzi’ot, in the Negev, with the Israeli state announcing that the camp would return to its original role “as a facility of interrogation and classification only.”

On August 16, Haaretz published eight anonymous testimonies in chronological order, featuring reservists and physicians.  They resemble the accounts of many a torture camp in history: routine brutality, systematic dehumanisation and abundant justification from various officials.  In the words of one reservist, “there was a female officer who gave us a briefing on the day we arrived.  She said, ‘It will be hard for you.  You’ll want to pity them, but it’s forbidden.  Remember that they are not people.”

On July 29, some 10 Israeli reservists held at Sde Teiman were arrested after collectively using various ghoulish methods against a Palestinian detainee, including anal penetration with iron bars.  The account was captured on a video and leaked.

Such alleged methods did not concern the protesters. The Beit Lid contingent proved noisy in demanding the release of their comrades.  In doing so, there was plenty by way of venomous accusation directed at the official authorities.  In holding such personnel in detention to face charges – not that these would necessarily amount to much – the smell of treason had begun to waft.  “The Military Advocate General [Yifar Tomer-Yerushalmi] loves Nukhba,” bellowed one sign located outside Beit Lid, a pointed reference to an alleged sympathy by Israel’s own MAG for the Hamas unit.

Members of the Israeli parliament found appearing at the protest irresistible.  “I came to Sde Teiman to tell our fighters that we are with you, we will protect you,” trumpeted Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech.  “We will never allow the criminal Military Advocate General to hurt you.  She cares about the Nukhba terrorists and cares about their rights, instead of caring for our fighters, she is weakening our fighters.  History will judge her and we will judge her too.”

In a broader sense, the idea of holding Israeli soldiers to account for their brutality through standard legal processes has been a matter of performance.  That the military court at Beit Lid even went so far as to hold a hearing for the soldiers – of which two were released on July 30 – was impressive if only for show.  But the show was suitably enraging for protesters adamant that such figures could ever be held liable for committing crimes against enemies long bleached of their humanity, let alone political worth.

Outside the court, a spouse of one of the soldiers, whose name was not provided due to a gag order regarding the suspects, offered a cold dismissal of rape charges.  “This is a testimony of a despicable Nukhba fighter with blood on his hands, who dared to complain, and all the country is raging because of it.  We shouldn’t forget who our real enemy is. We are facing monsters, a terrorist organization, and I say we will defeat them.”

The sentiments of rage could also be found among various members of the Israeli cabinet.  Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had no issue with the conduct recorded on the video less than the fact that it had been leaked.  Nothing less than an “immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of this trending video” was required, given its “tremendous damage to Israel in the world”.  National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called the arrests “shameful”.  Such individuals were “our best heroes”.

In the Knesset, a grotesque debate ensued.  Arab MP, Ahmad Tibi, queried whether it was a legitimate practice “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum”.  Hanoch Milwidsky of the ruling Likud party was unequivocal in reply: “If he is a Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do!  Everything!”

The notion of Israeli forces being the exceptional standard bearers of civilised conduct, reluctantly engaged in violence they would otherwise wish to avoid, has vanished before the colonial settler’s violent logic so commonly found in the West Bank.  Be it illegal settlements or orchestrated gang rape, all is fair in hate and war against the Palestinians.FacebookTwitter

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

The DNC Fiddles While the World Burns

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / August 21st, 2024

DNC delegates unfurl banner during Biden’s speech at the DNC. Photo credit: Esam Boraey

An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.

Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We  Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.

In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.

In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the US into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.

Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.

To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.
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The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?

This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.

Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?

The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.

Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.

But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

President Zelenskyy remains in power three months after his term of office expired, and he is a great admirer of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something so provocative that it will draw U.S. and NATO forces into the potentially nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?

A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.

While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdown and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis too.

Under the slick climate plan Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still double those of our Chinese, British and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production have soared to all-time record highs.

The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election-year focus on what the two parties disagree about, the corrupt policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.

President Biden recently claimed that he is “running the world.” No oligarchic American politician will confess to “running the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and millions more Americans who support them understand that that is what Biden, Trump and their cronies are doing.

The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people in the streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.

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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. Read other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.