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| Letters Investing Pros and Cons The War Resisters League giving investment advice (“Investing for Activists,” July-August)? What next, The New York Times running three articles on anarchism in a week? Have the tides turned? A new generation of activists is out in the street, motivated by the rise of global capitalism, the rampant commercialism and the shameless displays of riches around us while others starve, and the WRL is using two pages of its precious space to offer investment advice! The NVA would best serve our membership by focusing on things that are hard to find elsewhere—articles, stories and ideas about radical nonviolence in theory and practice, at home and abroad. Articles promoting capitalism—no matter how socially responsible—are still about capitalism and have no more place in the NVA than an article rating which branch of the military is the least militaristic. Besides, there are plenty of other publications and organizations that have such information for members who need it. —Ruth Benn, Ed Hedemann Thank you for printing “Investing for Activists.” It provided useful information for activists who are financially able to invest money for their retirements. However, it skirted a fundamental issue: How many of us working for non-profits are financially well-off enough to be able to consider investment alternatives. As many of us grow gray hairs after years and decades of peace work, we are woefully unprepared to “retire.” As a single mother working at non-profit salaries to support two children, I have accumulated debt and have not been able to put away much money for my “retirement.” I urge the peace community to re-examine the assumptions that we live with in our non-profit world. Shouldn’t we reward years of service with a decent salary rather than the worry of retirement? Shouldn’t we be considered experts for 20 years of work on peace issues and rewarded for that expertise? Shouldn’t our organizations step up to the plate and appreciate our service and take care of us? One excellent option to consider is the National Organizers Alliance Pension Plan which was developed to address these issues for all organizers. Their goal is to set a new standard: that workers for progressive social change should be able to expect a pension as one of the benefits of employment. Contact them at (800)NOA-PENS for more information. This is a challenge to all non-profit boards and non-profit staffs to reconsider what our valuable work—bringing about social change—is really worth and make the changes necessary in our organizations so that retirement is not a worry. —Susan
Gordon Let’s Not Exaggerate Tyrone Savage’s article, “Superpowered Superpolluter” (NVA, July-August 2000) is marred by at least three significant factual errors: First, Savage writes, “On the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, which the U.S. Navy has used as a bombing range for half a century, the cancer incidence is 28 times [emphasis in original] that of the main island.” According to a Free Vieques website (www.viequeslibre.org), “Studies carried out by the Puerto Rico Department of Health have shown that from 1985 to 1989 the rate of cancer in Vieques rose to 26 percent above the rest of [Puerto Rico].” Significant, but only about 1/100th of the increase claimed in the NVA! Second, he writes, “During the bombing of Yugoslavia, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed that DU was used in the shell casings fired against Serbian forces by A-10 Warthog jets and as nose cones in Tomahawk missiles.” In May, 1999, a Pentagon spokesperson (not the Joint Chiefs of Staff) did confirm use of DU in the 30-mm. armor-piercing incendiary shells fired by the A-10 against Serbian forces, although the DU is in the bullets, not the shell casings. The military has never confirmed DU’s use “as nose cones in Tomahawk missiles,” but only as ballast—part of a mock “payload”—in Tomahawk cruise missile flight tests. Pentagon sources have denied—and I have found no evidence to contradict them—that DU has been incorporated in the “nose cone” manufacture of Tomahawks, nor employed in a conventional weapons payload package for armor piercing or any other purposes by operational Tomahawks. Third, Savage writes, “Depleted uranium … can deliver a lethal exposure in seconds to someone standing unshielded three feet away.” Again, without detailed references, this statement is generally false, or at least an absurd and misleading exaggeration of a minute possibility. U-238 is predominantly an alpha radiation source—nasty over time when lodged in the body, but not like the gamma radiation that can kill you in seconds from a few feet away. While the U-238 rounds that aircraft and tank crews load up are sheathed with a non-reactive alloy, plenty of manufacturing workers were surrounded by the unshielded stuff for decades more than seconds and have not suffered such rapid lethality. The evidence of criminal militarism and the dangers of DU are sufficient enough when stated plainly and honestly. These hyperboles and errors demean our credibility. Please correct them. —Jack
Cohen-Joppa The editors
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