“These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. … Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”
Let’s have a new, sober, serious, non-paranoid gun organization whose members are the sane, thoughtful, responsible sportsmen who share the belief of the vast majority of Americans that assault weapons have no place in U.S. society. These mature minutemen also share the belief that state licensing of weapons, checks for criminal and mental backgrounds, and elimination of unregulated gun shows are necessary for a secure society.
We continue to spend hundreds of billions, even trillions, of tax dollars to achieve the elusive goal of national security. The movie-goers of Aurora, the little children of Newtown, were not secure. Those children are just as dead as if al Qaeda had killed them. Killing children is not a political issue: it is a moral issue.
The militia of the Constitution, now the National Guard and Reserve forces, are composed of serious, responsible citizens. Many are hunters and fishermen. They do not require an organization with a central message of paranoia to represent them. They should now form their own organization to speak for them and the great majority of gun owners would join them.
Why doesn’t anyone blame George W. Bush for these mass shootings? He’s the one who led the charge to let the assault weapons ban expire. Why aren’t the politicians in Congress who take campaign money from assault weapons manufacturers ever held accountable by the public?…
What in the world does the 2nd amendment have to do with these incidents? Do they look like a “well-regulated militia” to you? Semi-automatic weapons are the 18th-century equivalent of artillery in terms of their ability to kill. Do you think people should be allowed to have artillery pieces in their back yards, too? Is this some sort of sick joke, that you are telling us our children have to die because the Founding Fathers wanted madmen to have high-powered weaponry?…
Why aren’t there more class-action lawsuits against the people responsible for the proliferation of high- powered weaponry in our society? Lax gun laws and inadequate security checks in Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky and 7 other states meant that they supplied nearly half the 43,000 guns traced to crime scenes in other states in one recent year. The guns aren’t randomly acquired, and they aren’t used or Saturday night specials. They come disproportionately from specific states…
Why doesn’t anyone on television news ever simply give this statistic: In one recent year, there were 39 murders by gun in the UK, but 9,000 in the United States? Why is it wrong to let Americans know how peculiar is the situation Americans have to live in?
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center (from his 12/16/12 newsletter,not yet posted on his website):
The address and phone number of the NRA (National Rifle Association) are 11250 Waples Mill Rd, Fairfax, VA 22030; (703) 267-1000. Please call…through the week. (In Jewish tradition, “sitting shiva” to mourn the dead takes seven days.). If you get a busy signal, Good! That means many people are calling; please keep calling for as long as you have the time. When you get through, ask for Wayne LaPierre (NRA’s executive director) and when you reach his office begin reading the names of the Newtown Connecticut dead that are listed above. When you have read some of the names, say that you insist the NRA announce it supports a Federal law prohibiting assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons and supports a Universal Background Check. This should not take more than five minutes. When you have done this, please drop me a note at Office@theshalomcenter.org
Total registration, just like with cars. An end to automatic and semi-automatic weapons. And an end to blaming massacres on crazies. Gun massacres require guns that can massacre. Eliminate them.
Filmmaker/Activist Michael Moore, in a speech Friday night in NYC:
Other countries, I mean, they have their crazy people, and they have people that—there have been shootings and killings in Norway, in France and in Germany. But there haven’t been 61 mass killings like there have been in this country just since Columbine. Sixty-one mass shootings in this country… We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians. We’ve got five wars going on right now where our soldiers are killing people—I mean, five that we know of. We are on the short list of illustrious countries who have the death penalty. We believe it’s OK to kill you when you’ve committed a crime.
And then we have all the other forms of violence in this country that we don’t really call violence, but they are acts of violence. When you—when you make sure that 50 million people don’t have health insurance in your country and that, according to the congressional study that was done, 44,000 people a year die in America for the simple reason that they don’t have health insurance, that’s a form of murder. That murder is being committed by the insurance companies. When you evict millions of peoples—millions of people from their homes, that’s an act of violence. That’s called a home invasion.
Later today I’ll post some resources for helping children deal with grief.
As you pointed out, the average associate at Walmart makes less than $9 an hour. I don’t know how anybody these days can afford their rent, afford their food, afford their health coverage, afford their transportation costs just to get to work, when they’re making only $9 an hour or less.
And who ends up paying for it? It’s the taxpayer…The taxpayer pays the earned income credit. The taxpayer pays for Medicaid. The taxpayer pays for the unemployment insurance when they cut their hours down. And the taxpayers pay for other forms of public assistance like food stamps. I think that the taxpayer is getting fed up paying for all these things when, in fact, Walmart could give every single employee it’s got, even the CEO, a 30% raise, and Walmart would still be profitable… I don’t think that Walmart should, in effect, be the largest recipient of public assistance in the country. In state after state after state, Walmart employees represent the largest group of Medicaid recipients, the largest group of food stamp recipients, and the taxpayers shouldn’t have to bear that burden. It should be Walmart. So we’re going to take that burden and put it where it belongs, on Walmart.
Consider framing for wide appeal when you develop your organizing messages. If you plan carefully, framing can play a major role in the debate. I credit a lot of the success of Save the Mountain, the environmental group I started in 1999 that beat back a terrible development project in just 13 months, to the careful attention I paid to framing, starting with the very first press release and continuing through the whole campaign.
Last night, we drove up to Brattleboro, Vermont, to testify before the Vermont Public Service Board, which is taking input on whether Entergy, the Louisiana-based owner of the severely troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
We didn’t get to testify; I was something like #78 on the list, across about eleven sites around the state, all televised live. But perhaps that’s just as well, because I’ve spent much of the day going into a lot more detail than I would have had in a two-minute live statement.
I’m going to share the testimony with you. If you’re inspired to give your input to the PSB, you can do so by e-mailing psb.clerk AT state.vt.us, or writing to Vermont Public Service Board, 112 State Street—Drawer 20, Montpelier, VT 05620-2701. You will want to include the docket number. I suggest you use this subject line:
Comment on PSB Docket No. 7862 (Entergy application for Certificate of Public Good)
This is what I submitted. Yes, I know it’s long. But this is one of the most important struggles of our time. If you’re not already familiar with the issues around nuclear power, this will give you some of the basics, as slanted toward an audience of government officials in the US who already know, for example, about the insurance exemption for nuclear power under the Price-Anderson Act that basically means if there’s a problem, the plant owner is not liable.
Dear members of the Vermont Public Service Board,
My name is Shel Horowitz. I am the author of one book on nuclear power and two award-winning books on business ethics and the environment. Like the majority of people who have come before you to testify, I ask that you deny the Certificate of Public Good for Entergy for the continued operation of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
Dictionary.com provides two definitions for “public good”:
1) a good or service that is provided without profit for society collectively
2) the well-being of the general public
According to both definitions, Vermont Yankee and Entergy fail the test.
Definition #1 has three components:
a. a good or service is provided
b. without profit
c. for society as a whole.
Yes, Vermont Yankee provides electricity and jobs (though, as we will see later, less efficiently than its alternatives). But it fails utterly on the other two components. Entergy’s whole reason for existence is to provide profits for its shareholders and executives (as opposed to the whole society), and the callous way the company has disregarded both public safety and the truth is directly related to valuing short-term profit instead of the public good.
As to the second definition—I submit that Vermont Yankee not only does not support the well-being of the general public, it puts that well-being at severe risk. Vermont Yankee’s continued operation actively threatens the well-being of residents of three states.
I will elaborate several ways in which Entergy fails to achieve these standards. While I recognize that the federal government has preempted the safety discussion, I submit that you, the board members of the PSB, have an obligation to look at the economic consequences of the safety issues, as they apply to the question of whether Entergy is in fact providing a public good. For that reason, some (not all) of my arguments do include safety concerns, because every safety issue has an economic consequence.
Specific points:
Vermont Yankee has a troubling history of severe problems. As far back as 1973 (the last year that full reporting was required), when the plant was only a year old, Vermont Yankee reported 39 Abnormal Occurrences to the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor to the NRC). A single page of the printout lists six incidents, four of which are potentially significant threats: component failures in both Emergency Core Cooling System and radiation monitoring, and two explosions in the off-gas system within six days of each other. I am enclosing a copy of that printout, along with the descriptive text noting the 39 incidents at Vermont Yankee and 850 AOs nationally when the fleet was only 30 reactors (source: Gyorgy, Anna et al.: No Nukes: Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear Power. Boston: South End Press, 1979). [Click twice on the picture to read the printout (it’s the right-hand side of the graphic)]
one page of the multiple page printout of 39 safety problems at Vermont Yankee in one year
Other well-documented problems include the collapse of the cooling tower on August 22, 2007, and the more recent discovery that not only was Vermont Yankee polluting the Connecticut River with radioactive tritium, but Entergy lied about the very existence of the pipes conveying the tritium. All of these problems are expensive to fix, impacting ratepayers and residents.
Embrittlement and corrosion are severe problems for the nuclear energy generally. Years and years of bombardment by high doses of radiation, the ongoing trauma of New England’s severe winters, and exposure to corrosive chemicals weaken the structural integrity of metal and concrete—aging of the materials was cited as the cause of the cooling tower collapse, in fact. Should these issues start to affect the containment vessel or other key structural components, the results could be catastrophic to the local economy. And the likelihood of deep stress within the plant is high, because this plant was only designed to last 40 years and is now past its life expectancy. It is the height of irresponsibility to continue operating under these circumstances, and PSB’s mandate is to maintain the public good by denying the certificate.
While Vermont Yankee’s supporters cite the “public good” of Vermont Yankee in supplying jobs and baseload energy while not generating greenhouse gasses, none of these claims hold up to scrutiny. Clean, renewable energy provides far more jobs per megawatt. Vermont Yankee’s power is currently spread out over the grid and not part of the Vermont baseload, and in any case is frequently unavailable due to both planed and unplanned shutdowns and power reductions.
To accurately examine the issue of greenhouse gases, and, for that matter, net power generation, we have to remember that nuclear plants themselves are only one small part of the nuclear fuel cycle. The fuel cycle includes mining, milling, processing, assembly into fuel rods, transportation of the fuel, loading them into the reactor, running the reactor, sending electricity along the grid to remote locations (with severe transmission losses in the process), removing the spent fuel, storing it temporarily, and storing longer-term (though, as noted above, reliable permanent storage does not yet exist). Most of these processes are large-scale consumers of energy and emitters of greenhouse gases.
Like fossil fuels, uranium is a finite substance, and it requires extensive work to create usable fuel. Nuclear expert John J. Berger estimated that once the best quality uranium had been mined (by the 1970s), the remainder is of such low yield that a ton of rock yields only 44 ten-thousandths of an ounce of fissionable U-235. Berger also noted that as of 1977, the nuclear industry had consumed five times as much energy as it produced (source: Berger, John J. The Unviable Option. New York: Dell, 1977, pp. 115-116 and 150-151, as cited in Curtis, Richard, Elizabeth Hogan, and Shel Horowitz. Nuclear Lessons. Harrisburg: Stackpole Books, 1980, p. 222 and p. 90).
Routine operation of Vermont Yankee creates harmful radioactive waste that puts its workers and neighbors at risk of health problems (which in turn have a negative economic impact), and that must be isolated from the environment for 250,000 years. Humans have no track record in preserving anything for more than about 30,000 years; we have a few arrowheads and pottery shards from that era. Entergy employs enormous hubris to suggest that when we have no computer data even 100 years old, no languages even 5000 years old, and no artifacts even 50,000 years old, that we will somehow be able to instruct people 10,000 generations into the future on how to maintain the safe and complete isolation of these poisons, even though we don’t yet have any idea how to do this. Obviously, even assuming the language and communication issues can be surmounted, going back in every 50 or 100 years to inspect and rebuild the barriers between these toxic poisons and the environment will be a massively expensive financial burden to future generations of Vermonters—but not to Entergy, which will in all probability not last as long as the problem it is creating.
Like Fukushima, Vermont Yankee is at risk of catastrophe during severe weather events. Hurricane Irene proved that southern Vermont is not immune to weather catastrophe; last year’s tornado devastated Hampden County, Massachusetts, only about an hour away. And of course, just last month, Superstorm Sandy caused major damage not very far away. These damaging weather events will only increase (see, for instance, NASA climatologist James Hansen, writing in the Washington Post: “This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.” <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-here–and-worse-than-we-thought/2012/08/03/6ae604c2-dd90-11e1-8e43-4a3c4375504a_story.html>, emphasis added).
Items #5 and #6 point to the grave threat in the event of accident (or sabotage). More than 25 years after the Chernobyl accident, large areas in the Ukraine are still uninhabitable, and their land removed from agricultural production. This kind of ecological devastation should be unacceptable anywhere; in an area as dependent on agriculture and tourism as Vermont, it is especially troublesome; it would cause billions of dollars in damage and basically eliminate the local economy.
Once again, the definition of pubic good requires benefits “for society collectively, and not for profit.” However, should there be a major accident at Vermont Yankee, what gets shared collectively is not the benefit, but the risk. As you know, nuclear power plant owners and operators are protected from the financial consequences of accidents by the Price-Anderson Act—a threat to every American’s economic well-being. Entergy takes the profits—but the citizens of Vermont and neighboring states take the risk. And this risks are real; as I wrote in the 2011 post-Fukushima update to my book Nuclear Lessons (published in Japan by Kinokuniya), there have been at least 101 accidents causing loss of life or at least $50,000 in property damage, including not only the 2011 Fukushima accident but also a lesser-known accident there in 2010.
It is hard to make a claim that a company as consistently disingenuous as Entergy can in any way be a partner in the public good. Two among many examples: Entergy accepted a set of conditions giving the State of Vermont power to decide whether the plant should be allowed to continue operating past the original March 2012 expiration date. However, when the state legislature chose not to allow a renewal, Entergy has refused to obey the law and continues to operate while suing the state. Then there were the lies about the tritium leaks. As an expert in business ethics, I see that these two instances demonstrate that this company does not follow accepted standards of business ethics, and should not be trusted to responsibly operate this highly dangerous apparatus.
My final point addresses whether nuclear power is the best way to achieve (public good definition #2) “the well-being of the general public.” Nuclear power is, inevitably, a high-risk proposition involving concentrating centralized resources, combining numerous complex processes, and wasting much of both the natural resources and energy required to produce this power. I suggest that first of all, as a society, we can easily slash our energy use by 50 to 80 percent, using deep conservation and better design. Germany uses about half as much energy per capita as the United States, to achieve a comparable quality of life. Here in the U.S., we have the technology to do even better. We can design buildings that are so in tune with their environment, they don’t need furnaces or air conditioning. We can follow the example of the Empire State Building, which is saving more than $4 million per year following a deep energy retrofit. We can use small-scale solar and wind, in-stream (non-dammed) hydro, geothermal, and other truly clean and renewable technologies to generate the energy we need right where it will be used, eliminating the colossal waste of energy lost in transmission. This is the way to a sustainable future for our children and future generations. This is the REAL public good.
Respectfully submitted,
Shel Horowitz
Hadley, MA
Author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, Nuclear Lessons, and six other books.
It seems we are experts at knowing what’s wrong in the world – whether global problems like climate change and poverty, national concerns like the economy and health care, neighborhood issues like the lady down the street whose dogs never stop barking. Even within our own families, we tend to focus on what’s not working.
What happens when we turn and face in another direction? Not to actively ignore or deny those very real problems. But to focus instead on what we want. Do we ever even ask this question of ourselves or others: what sort of world do we want to live in?
Even then, the answers may come back framed in negatives, such as “I want fewer wars” or “to eliminate racism.” The brilliant Hildy Gottlieb first opened my eyes to this habit.
I tested this out one recent weekend at our neighborhood shopping area, taking video footage of everyday people addressing these big issues. People were quick to cite the problems: education, the economy, global warming, racism, negativity, stereotyping, war. When asked to say what they want, if they could wave a magic wand and fix everything, they were less confident, sometimes even embarrassed. As if talking that way is not an adult activity.
The danger of dwelling on what’s wrong is that we can become convinced that there’s no hope for us. We’re just a doomed species and blight on the planet. I know many avid and dedicated environmental activists who harbor this secret belief deep within their hearts: that the planet will be better off without us.
And why wouldn’t we reach this conclusion, when all we read about and see around us are the consequences of our bad behavior? The mortgage crisis, countries in the Euro zone so deep in debt they threaten to take the whole thing down with them, giant corporations cutting down the boreal forest in Canada to get at the dirtiest, most carbon-intense oil on the planet and then lobbying our government to build a pipeline to cart it to the Gulf of Mexico. Fifty million nonelderly Americans (18.9%) are without health insurance or access to good health care.
This stuff is senseless. Meaning, try as we might, we can’t make sense of it. I wonder if it’s because, as Einstein famously observed, we cannot solve our problems using the same thinking that created them. So why not try a different way? What happens when we focus instead on what we want, instead of what we don’t want? Try it. You may be surprised at what happens.
Why does this matter? you may be wondering. It turns out that we create the future every moment of every day. A positive vision of a future that we want is the galvanizing force that animates the world-changing work of all the people who will be in the film, “I Want America to Thrive.” Even the title speaks to a positive vision. Why not? It’s a surer way to transcending, rather than merely solving, our problems.
Eco-architect Julie Gabrielli has been at the forefront of the sustainability movement in Maryland for over 15 years. She is an artist and writer, always searching for the most effective medium to wake people up to the beauty of our world. To learn more and stay in touch, Like this film on Facebook.
This year’s Blog Action Day theme is “The Power of We” (hashtags #BAD12 and #powerofwe)—and I can think of no better example than the powerful story of Save the Mountain, a group I founded in 1999 to protect the threatened Mount Holyoke Range that runs behind my house in Hadley, Massachusetts.
Here’s how I tell the story in my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (it’s in third-person because I have a co-author):
In November 1999, a developer announced a plan to desecrate ridgetop land abutting a state park by building 40 trophy homes two miles from Shel’s house. The original newspaper article interviewed several local conservationists who expressed variations on “Oh, this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.”
But Shel refused to accept that. Within four days, he had drawn up a petition, posted a Web page, called a meeting for two weeks later, and sent out press releases and fliers about the formation of Save the Mountain.
Note that all of these actions are marketing actions. He could have called a meeting and not told the public, and then a few friends would have shown up and realized that they couldn’t do very much. But by harnessing the power of the press, the Internet, and the photocopier, and crafting a message that would resonate with his neighbors–that not only was this terrible, but that there was something we could do–he was able to spark something that truly had an impact.
Shel and his wife, Dina Friedman, expected 20 or so people to come to the first meeting; they had over 70. From that day until December 2000, the group fought the project on every conceivable level: technical issues like hydrology, rare species, and slope of the road…organizing and marketing components including a petition drive (over 3000 signed), turnout of up to 450 at various public hearings, lawn signs, tabling, a big press campaign with over 70 articles…working with the state Department of Environmental Management to investigate options for saving the land…
Literally hundreds of people got involved with some degree of active participation. Many, many people brought widely varying expertise to the movement, far more than any of them could have had on their own.
By using his own skills in marketing and organizing, Shel was able to convert the outrage and despair and shock that were felt throughout a three-county area when this project was announced into a powerful–and highly visible–public force. As a group, STM had about 35 core activists, all working on many levels, both public and private. The persuasion in this case was not about the desirability of stopping the project; they had near-consensus on that, community-wide. Rather, it focused on the ability of a committed group of people to make a difference even when the experts said it was impossible.
Within two months, STM had established itself firmly in the public eye–and had actually shifted the discourse from “There’s nothing you can do” to “Which strategies will be most effective?” Collectively, the group used its powers of persuasion, and its skills at reaching the public with this message, to change the project from inevitable to impossible. The land was permanently preserved in just 13 months–four years ahead of Shel’s original five-year estimate for victory.
Excerpted, with permission, from Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shel Horowitz (John Wiley & Sons). To get your own copy from your favorite bookseller or an autographed copy dfrectly form me, (including $2000 worth of bonuses), please visit https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com and scroll to the bottom.
As a professional marketer and speaker, I look at speeches differently from a lot of other people. I look not only at what the speaker says, but at how effectively the ideas and emotions are communicated: how it impacts the listener. Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention [link to a transcript] gets an almost perfect 9.9 from me. I think when people remember the great speeches of the 21st century, this one has a good chance of making the list. Just as we remember 20th-century orators like Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, and Maya Angelou, we will remember Michelle as an orator alongside Barack. People are still talking about Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 National Convention, and about his speech in Cairo early in his presidency. I predict that people will be remembering Michelle Obama’s speech [link to the video] years from now. Why?
Without ever calling the Republicans out, she made a clear distinction not only in the candidates’ values, but also in their origins; Mitt Romney constantly struggles to connect with people less fortunate than he, while Michelle Obama gripped the audience with the unforgettable images of Barack picking her up in a car so old and rusty she could see through the floor to the pavement…of his proudest possession back then, a table he fished out of a dumpster.
She reminded us over and over again of the hope and promise of the 2008 campaign, and connected this year’s campaign to that same hope, even while the youth who were so inspired four years ago are disappointed in what Barack Obama has accomplished. Her message to youth was clear: we are not done yet, and we are still here for you—but you need to get out there and vote (italics are taken directly from Michelle Obama’s speech):
And if so many brave men and women could wear our country’s uniform and sacrifice their lives for our most fundamental rights—then surely we can do our part as citizens of this great democracy to exercise those rights. Surely, we can get to the polls and make our voices heard on Election Day. If farmers and blacksmiths could win independence from an empire. If immigrants could leave behind everything they knew for a better life on our shores. If women could be dragged to jail for seeking the vote. If a generation could defeat a depression, and define greatness for all time. If a young preacher could lift us to the mountaintop with his righteous dream. And if proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love—then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.Because in the end, more than anything else, that is the story of this country — the story of unwavering hope grounded in unyielding struggle.
As my wife, D. Dina Friedman, pointed out immediately afterward, she positioned some of Barack’s liabilities, such as his insistence on building consensus with Republicans who not only won’t reach consensus but who are actively sabotaging his efforts, as strengths:
I love that for Barack, there is no such thing as “us” and “them” — he doesn’t care whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or none of the above. He knows that we all love our country. And he’s always ready to listen to good ideas. He’s always looking for the very best in everyone he meets.
She reached out to many constituencies: veterans, teachers, firefighters, poor people working class people, those with disabilities, single moms, grandparents, dads, people facing serious illness, those in the struggle for women’s reproductive rights, recent grads under pressure of student loans or other crippling debt, those who remember the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, gays and lesbians and those who stand with them in the struggle for marriage equality. And time after time, she reached out to moms and identified as a mom.
Above all, her delivery was from the heart. She connected to her audience as a person, a mom, and as an advocate for the best of American values. She was both sincere and enormously likable. Even her little hint of a stammer came across as endearing. She didn’t need props or PowerPoint. My guess is she didn’t even need the teleprompter that no doubt was in her view.
So why do I give a 9.9 and not a 10? I deduct one tenth for staying behind the lectern. That is much more distancing; when I speak, I stand to the side of the lectern, so there’s no barrier between me and my audience, yet I can still see my notes. However, she was able to overcome that distance and connect personally and viscerally with the live audience and those watching from afar. If Barack Obama does win a second term, I think Michelle Obama will deserve some of the credit.
This is great news—but I have to question why the district switched to compostable disposable trays. It’s certainly more ecological, and probably cheaper, to buy a commercial dishwasher and switch to not only reusable trays, but reusable dishes as well. I would think the materials savings would cover the costs of the machine and the employees to run it, as well as create some needed employment.
