In January, Conscious Choice, a Chicago urban lifestyle magazine released “The Chicago Green Report Card.” Examining Mayor Richard J. Daley’s commitment to a cleaner Chicago, it evaluated the city’s environmental progress and issued grades in 11 key areas—such as making Chicago the organic food capital of the Midwest, cleaning up the Chicago River and creating a world-class mass transit system.… return to article
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Reader Comments (12)Page 1 of 1 pagesOne of the worst side effects of war, according to humanitarian NGOs, is the ongoing effects of tactical and logistical residuals such as barbed wire enclosures and other disruptive infrastructure of war, land mines, and destruction from depleted uranium. All this keeps killing, maiming and disrupting and ruining everyday life long after the official hostilities cease. War, a key source of global capitalism’s ability to survive, expand, and restructure capital and restore falling profit rates without the associated renewed rising employment pressures,
Yet war is expensive, polluting, and filled with myriad annoyances for local populations. One of the contradictions is that as war expands opportunites for monopoly capitalismboth in terms of direct contracting and in politically forcing open markets for goods and capital, it creates other expensive problems and local resistence that is hard to overcome.
The current epoch of globalization has witnessed the decline of US economic hegemony in the wake of corporate growth of EU and Japanese firms as well as some third world ones like those of Korea and Brazil. US imperialism has relied increasingly on the military in order to maintain its global dominance and economic advantages. Yet war is becoming increasingly untenable. The welling up of sharp contradictions could spell an impending crisis for US imperialism.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Apr 10, 2007 at 10:06 PM Shaw took a principled stand, and for that gets vilified by a site that tries to call itself “worldchanging”? “A substantial military capable of projecting force” - How about we “project force” Steffan to the front lines where he can “project force” to some more innocent civilians? Shaw is absolutely heroic and correct in what he said and did, in not going with the U.S. military’s program of the day. I’m sure the Pentagon will find many, many sources for “greening up,” drawn from all the easily-bought ranks of the college-"educated" graduates. Martin Seligman, former APA president and guru of “positive"psychology, has given special briefings to the US military - Shaw’s stand looks awfully large compared to these folks…
Posted by notabilia on Apr 11, 2007 at 10:28 AM See Ayn Rand’s essay The Roots Of War in Capitalism:The Unknown Ideal. Capitalism is the most anti-war, pro-peace system ever conceived. Socialists start wars and killed over 200 million in the Communist countries during just the 20th century. Socialist societies
like Cuba and Vietnam all have conscription. Ignore the Marxian BS in the first posting.
Posted by blondemike on Apr 11, 2007 at 5:52 PM “ Uranium 238, which is depleted and used in U.S. armor-piercing rounds and Phalanx missiles, has a half-life of 4.5 billion years—it stays in the human body almost indefinitely”
....If you can find a person with a depleted uranium shell in them I would love to see the case. The energy transfer to a human body would render the corpse unrecognizable and require a shovel to accumulate enough parts to study. As depleted uranium shells are strictly anti-armor the total amount expended since 2003 is minimal. Haji doesn’t have any more tanks or BMP’s to shoot at so high density bismuth with a steel jacket is the ammo of choice.
humvees or the M998 High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) are diesel powered all wheel drive vehicles. The “Hummer” you hippies despise so much is gasoline powered and a civilian vehicle. Different vehicles.........The civilian version is uneconomical and impractical the military version is the perfect offroad vehicle and fuel efficient.
“withdraw our armed presence from, among other locations, the Middle East and central Asia”
What utter horseshit. Haji wants to die. He has made his needs clear to any reasonable person who listens. He needs our help to meet Allah. We are helping him to accomplish his dream as quickly and expeditiously as possible.
Posted by texasindependent on Apr 15, 2007 at 12:45 AM Tex,
DU is not pure U238 but 99.8&#xU2;38 and 0.2% u235% by mass. There is also a small speck of U234 which contributes about 14% of the radioactivity emitted while U235 contributes about 1%. The remainder is Alpha radiation contributed by the U238. The other 15% is highly damaging Beta and Gamma radiation which has a very long half life. It is useful in armor piercing because it is two and a half times the density of steel and one and a half times the density of lead. The danger is that the uranium tip burns up and disintegrates because of the speed and momentum of the blast and spreads radioactivity. Depleted Uranium is made from Uranium Hexafloride (UF6) which is so plentiful (about 728,000 metric tonnes) that its widespread use is seen as a positive way of reducing excess US stocks of this radioactive material. Thousands of rounds have been used in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf.
Dozens of US and other soldiers have complained of the health effects of exposure to DU and a study of live births at the Basra University Hospital shows that an increase of 426% for general malignancies, 366% for leukemia, and over 600% for general birth defects over the period 1990 to 2001. This is attributed to the heavy use of depleted uranium in the Basra province in the early stages of combat in the first Gulf War. As of the first quarter of 2000, there were about 63 cases of DU poisening being treated by the VA health clinics and hospitals. There are more today. DU should be dropped. It is also an inhumane weapon as it violates the Geneva Conventions on the use of such weapons due to the manner of death it inflicts on the enemy which involves suffocation from depleted oxygen and burning up from the fires created on impact
.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Apr 15, 2007 at 10:16 AM The use of depleted uranium is a war crime. Plain and simple.
Tex, your callous attitude towards people in the Middle East, exemplified by your derogatory use of the word Haji which in proper usage is a term of respect, is LOATHSOME.
Remember ... blessed are the peacemakers.
Posted by David in Canuckistan on Apr 15, 2007 at 4:32 PM How can an accepted term by Islam be derogatory? It means one who has completed the haj. And I respect haji’s determination and realize he believes every word he speaks.
I respect both David and Cabdriver. I wish the world was a place where noble ideas had a chance of success. But neither of you have any combat experience I would assume? I can not explain the sensations or smells or sounds of warfare. It is as described hours of boredom shattered by moments of sheer terror. The object is to overwhelm your enemy with shattering firepower and remove any possibility of his fighting back. Whatever tools it takes to accomplish that goal will and should be given to our military.
DU is an armor piercing round. It was expended against armor and infantry fighting vehicles in the initial invasion. After the destruction of the Iraqi armored forces it was replaced by high density bismuth with a steel jacket. How would I know this? I loaded up with the new ammo for 8 months the old ammo for 6 months.
63 cases of DU poisoning in 500000 men would indicate ammo handlers or manufacturers.
Posted by texasindependent on Apr 15, 2007 at 7:14 PM The novel, “The Haj” that was the most racist novel ever published, another Jewish Zionist Racist, surprise ! surprise ! and this comes from Alberto Gonzalez’s bastard nephew, TexASS. I have no sympathy for your combat experiences because you volunteered for them precisely because you are a war criminal. TexASS Nonindependent, you belong in prison. Do yo’ folks still use the San Antone newspaper as a May Hee Con umbrella ? Probably the best use for it really. And have yo’ peepul grasped the technology of the flush handle toilet or is it against their religion to flush ?
Posted by blondemike on Apr 16, 2007 at 10:10 AM Better a war criminal then a psuedo-intellectual race criminal from Oakland.
Dumbass..........
Posted by texasindependent on Apr 16, 2007 at 8:14 PM “Better a war criminal” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And what’s a “race criminal” ??????????????????
Oh, right, Alberto Gonzalez and Al Sharpton....................
Posted by blondemike on Apr 18, 2007 at 10:00 AM If it’s “sustainability” the military is looking for, the civilian government could have helped with that by not stupidly initiating two wars in less than two years, dividing the forces and making it impossible to adequately accomplish even one of the original missions.
Posted by Kuya on Apr 20, 2007 at 3:17 AM Hi,Y’all!
blondemike,
You are telling us to read Ayn Rand and,I’m supposing,we are to take her seriously?
JACK BARNES HAS RETURNED TO THIS SITE!!!
Oh! Oh! What fun! What a lovely diversion to the necessary tedium of summer school, and a sorbet to clear the mental palate after hours of reading! Thank you! Thank you!
Ta-Ta!
Posted by Aunty Rightwing on Apr 23, 2007 at 12:56 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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