The jobs scam - selling blacks on nuclear power

Glen Ford, a co-founder of the Black Agenda Report - writes about the deliberate efforts by the nuclear power industry to build new reactors in poor black communities desperate for jobs. As Ford points out, "corporate promoters are already re-reving their propaganda machines to sell Blacks on nuclear power with the same jobs-creaation argument they pushed three decades ago. Nuclear companies have been flying Black and brown delegations to visit happy neighborhoods around power plants in France." Ford, the godfather of black journalism, recalls how 30 years ago Westinghouse advertised on a syndicated television news interview program he then co-owned and hosted called America's Black Forum, believing that "jobs-hungry Black folks would serve as a counter-point to the long-haired white kids and tree-huggers that the media caricatured as the core of the environmental movement".

Bruce Dixon questions environmental racism of new Georgia reactors

Bruce Dixon, co-founder of the Black Agenda Report, has an excellent article on the Huffington Post as well as the BAR Web site regarding the decision to award the first $8 billion in federal loan guarantees to the construction of two new reactors in a poor black community in Georgia that does not want the plant. As Dixon notes: "The Obama administration likes to call it "safe nuclear energy," often in the same breath as "clean coal." Both are colossal and equally transparent lies." And putting the lie to the nukes-will-bring-you-wealth myth, Dixon writes: "If leaky civilian and military nukes really are the job-creating answers to poverty, shouldn't Burke County, GA be one of the wealthiest, instead of the poorest places east of the Mississippi 25 years after its first civilian nukes, and six decades after neighboring towns, some of them all black on the South Carolina side of the river, were bulldozed to create the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility?"