Vermont’s only congressman, Bernie Sanders, identifies himself in the House of Representatives as an Independent, but back here on the home turf, it’s well-known that he’s a socialist. He’s not the only one, but people don’t use the “s-word” in public, so everyone left of a Vermont Democrat just calls themselves “progressive.”
You might say the term “progressive politician” is an oxymoron because you can’t fulfill the adjective without cancelling the noun, or vice versa. Most of the time, Bernie straddles the gap pretty well, but when he boots one he really hears about it, as we shall soon see.
You see, we make nuclear waste in Vermont, along with the maple syrup and the hippie ice cream, not that we’re happy about it or that we had any say in it, but the fact remains – for at least the next 500,000 years – that Vermont has made nuclear waste. This is where the trouble starts. Vermont and Maine and Texas have entered into a compact that would send nuclear waste from the New England states to a town in west Texas.
First, this flies in the face of New England’s self-image. New Englanders, I was led to believe, are self-sufficient and self-reliant. But when it comes to nuclear waste, all that goes out the window and we’re dressing up our spent fuel rods in chaps and spurs.
And before we get back to Bernie, let’s consider west Texas for a moment. Hudspeth County, which is slated to receive this radioactive Yankee crap, is – to no one’s surprise – poor and overwhelmingly Mexican-American. It’s bad enough that New England has very few people of color, but now we’re trafficking in interstate racism.
Not only that, Hudspeth County is already home to one of America’s largest sewage sludge landspreading projects. Is it not sufficient that the poor citizens of Hudspeth County literally have turds from the five boroughs of New York City rolling around the west Texas desert, baking in the summer sun, but now we have to add nuclear waste? How much can these people be asked to endure?
Before any of this can happen, it has to be approved by Congress and Bernie is pushing to get it through the House. Our senators, Leahy the Democrat and Jeffords the Republican, are pushing it too, but we have lower expectations of them so the sense of betrayal isn’t so pronounced.
Last month, at Bernie’s big progressive fundraising dinner – on May Day, of course – hordes of anti-nuclear protesters were threatening to storm the Burlington Sheraton, which is where the bougie Vermont Socialists eat their clams casino. To top it off, the featured speaker was Jim Hightower, famous WebActive denizen and outspoken opponent of the west Texas nuke dump. A perfect night for factional cannibalism on the left. We’ve got Hightower, the dump opponent, about to talk to the supporters of Bernie, the dump proponent, even if he is good on every other issue. Not only that, but there’s the capitalist constraint of the speaker’s fee gumming things up on both ends. A deal was cut at the last minute and the placard-wavers took a powder and in exchange Hightower agreed to take Bernie to the left-wing woodshed for a talking to.
But not much has changed. Bernie’s still on the wrong side of the dump issue, his constituents – myself included – are still howling, democracy is in action and we may beat this thing yet.
The bottom line is this: we never asked for those nukes in the first place and the responsibility for the mess rightfully belongs to the utilities and they’re the ones who should be made to keep the waste forever. But if we can’t do that, our minimum responsibility is not to pass it on to someone else.
Don’t Mess with Texas
Vermont’s only congressman, Bernie Sanders, identifies himself in the House of Representatives as an Independent, but back here on the home turf, it’s well-known that he’s a socialist. He’s not the only one, but people don’t use the “s-word” in public, so everyone left of a Vermont Democrat just calls themselves “progressive.”
You might say the term “progressive politician” is an oxymoron because you can’t fulfill the adjective without cancelling the noun, or vice versa. Most of the time, Bernie straddles the gap pretty well, but when he boots one he really hears about it, as we shall soon see.
You see, we make nuclear waste in Vermont, along with the maple syrup and the hippie ice cream, not that we’re happy about it or that we had any say in it, but the fact remains – for at least the next 500,000 years – that Vermont has made nuclear waste. This is where the trouble starts. Vermont and Maine and Texas have entered into a compact that would send nuclear waste from the New England states to a town in west Texas.
First, this flies in the face of New England’s self-image. New Englanders, I was led to believe, are self-sufficient and self-reliant. But when it comes to nuclear waste, all that goes out the window and we’re dressing up our spent fuel rods in chaps and spurs.
And before we get back to Bernie, let’s consider west Texas for a moment. Hudspeth County, which is slated to receive this radioactive Yankee crap, is – to no one’s surprise – poor and overwhelmingly Mexican-American. It’s bad enough that New England has very few people of color, but now we’re trafficking in interstate racism.
Not only that, Hudspeth County is already home to one of America’s largest sewage sludge landspreading projects. Is it not sufficient that the poor citizens of Hudspeth County literally have turds from the five boroughs of New York City rolling around the west Texas desert, baking in the summer sun, but now we have to add nuclear waste? How much can these people be asked to endure?
Before any of this can happen, it has to be approved by Congress and Bernie is pushing to get it through the House. Our senators, Leahy the Democrat and Jeffords the Republican, are pushing it too, but we have lower expectations of them so the sense of betrayal isn’t so pronounced.
Last month, at Bernie’s big progressive fundraising dinner – on May Day, of course – hordes of anti-nuclear protesters were threatening to storm the Burlington Sheraton, which is where the bougie Vermont Socialists eat their clams casino. To top it off, the featured speaker was Jim Hightower, famous WebActive denizen and outspoken opponent of the west Texas nuke dump. A perfect night for factional cannibalism on the left. We’ve got Hightower, the dump opponent, about to talk to the supporters of Bernie, the dump proponent, even if he is good on every other issue. Not only that, but there’s the capitalist constraint of the speaker’s fee gumming things up on both ends. A deal was cut at the last minute and the placard-wavers took a powder and in exchange Hightower agreed to take Bernie to the left-wing woodshed for a talking to.
But not much has changed. Bernie’s still on the wrong side of the dump issue, his constituents – myself included – are still howling, democracy is in action and we may beat this thing yet.
The bottom line is this: we never asked for those nukes in the first place and the responsibility for the mess rightfully belongs to the utilities and they’re the ones who should be made to keep the waste forever. But if we can’t do that, our minimum responsibility is not to pass it on to someone else.