Red light for the greenway
A wildlife corridor plans to connect two Superfund sites at the former Rocky Flats plutonium plant and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal that once produced chemical weapons. Locals fear residual contamination could spread.
John Abbotts, March 14, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/red-light-for-the-greenway-locals-oppose-wildlife-corridor-at-plutonium-contaminated-rocky-flats-site/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Plutonium-contaminated%20wildlife%20corridor%3F%20Colorado%20locals%20say%20no&utm_campaign=20250317%20Monday%20Newsletter
n September, the city council of Westminster, Colorado voted not to fund a pedestrian bridge and underpass at the Rocky Flats site due to concerns about residual soil contamination from plutonium and other hazardous materials. In the process, the city council withdrew about $200,000 in financial support for the development of the project, known as the Rocky Mountain Greenway.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed the greenway to connect wildlife refuges at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal through hiking trails via the Two Ponds refuge to Rocky Flats, with plans to eventually connect to the Rocky Mountain National Park. But the plan is controversial: Both Rocky Flats and the Arsenal are still on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List, identified since 1987 as “Superfund” cleanup sites that contain residual contamination.
The US Army established the Arsenal to produce chemical weapons to support World War II efforts, and in the 1990s, the federal government leased part of the Arsenal to Shell Chemical Co. to manufacture fertilizer and pesticides. In 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission began operations at Rocky Flats as a federal atomic weapons facility, producing plutonium triggers for hydrogen bombs. (A hydrogen bomb or H-bomb uses fission in the primary—uranium or plutonium—to trigger the secondary into a fusion reaction that combines two atomic nuclei to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing a much larger amount of energy.) Operations started largely in secret at Rocky Flats, located in a sparsely populated area 16 miles upwind and upslope of the city of Denver. But in the late 1970s, the public became more informed about plant operations, and the movement opposing atomic weapons began to focus on the facility, organizing protests and civil disobedience actions.
By the late 1980s, when the federal cleanup program at both sites had been initiated, work had already begun on the new Denver International Airport on Rocky Mountain Arsenal lands, and the Denver suburbs had steadily spread west toward Rocky Flats. Accordingly, there was consensus at each site that expedited cleanup would most effectively protect the metropolitan area, and cleanup standards were looser than “unrestricted use” to develop national wildlife refuges at each site. The consequences were residual contamination, especially at Rocky Flats, where there was no limit on how much plutonium remained below six feet of soil in an industrial area fenced off from the public and with the surrounding land converted to a wildlife refuge. This “cleanup on the cheap” at Rocky Flats, plus a record of cover-ups of accidents at the site, created continuing distrust and controversy over post-remediation uses near Rocky Flats. Cities and citizens opposed different proposals for re-use, even over the issue of public access to the refuge. Now there are concerns that the proposed greenway—a trail between the two tracts—may facilitate cross-contamination, taking radioactive material from the Rocky Flats site to the chemically hazardous Arsenal property, and vice versa.
Contamination—then a raid
Each of the two Rocky Mountain sites has a controversial history. At Rocky Mountain Arsenal, chemical contaminants have been identified as organochlorine pesticides, akin to DDT and its chemical cousins, of which Rachel Carson warned in her classic 1962 book Silent Spring. Other contaminants at the site include heavy metals, organophosphate, and carbamate pesticides—with each of these pesticide classes known to be neurotoxic—along with a potpourri of other chemical contaminants in groundwater.
As for Rocky Flats, a 1972 paper from radiochemist Edward Martell and one of his colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado reported that just east of the site boundary levels of radioactive plutonium 239 and americium 241 ranged “up to hundreds of times that from nuclear tests.” In 1969, a highly visible fire at the site’s plutonium processing facility sparked off-site monitoring; at the time, the fire was assumed to be the source of the detected contamination. Later, the Atomic Energy Commission was forced to admit that a 1957 fire in a separate plutonium recovery building or leaks from drums containing plutonium-contaminated waste were more likely the source of off-site soil contamination.
When the Rocky Flats facility was still operating, it accepted contaminated metal from another Atomic Energy Commission facility. In the process of treating and burying the waste, Rocky Flats released tritium into a nearby stream, contaminating the drinking water source for the city and county of Broomfield, five miles west of the facility. The contamination occurred for more than a decade leading up to 1970; the tritium remained undetected until 1973.
In 1986, amendments to Superfund legislation expanded the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to oversee the cleanup of contaminated federal facilities. The following year, the agency designated Rocky Mountain Arsenal as a Superfund site.
Then, in June 1989, the FBI and EPA raided the Rocky Flats plant in response to allegations of multiple environmental crimes at the site. After an investigation, plutonium production ended, the EPA designated Rocky Flats a Superfund site in the same year. In 1992, Rockwell International, the contractor in charge of managing the site, pleaded guilty to environmental crimes and paid a fine of $18.5 million.
Contested cleanup plans
The regulatory agencies responsible for environmental cleanup—the EPA’s Region 8 office, based in Denver, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment—have certified cleanup as partially complete at each site. The “responsible parties” are now the US Army for the Arsenal and the US Department of Energy for Rocky Flats.
At the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, cleanup extended to 10 feet below the surface, considered a sufficient depth to prevent burrowing animals from spreading the widespread chemical contamination there. In 2010, the regulatory agencies determined parts of the Arsenal sufficiently remediated to serve as a National Wildlife Refuge and transferred the management of the designated property to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. That service transferred a small herd of bison from a national range in Montana, and bison continue to inhabit the refuge.
The Army retains responsibility for a central area, along with smaller contaminated locations covered for monitoring and groundwater remediation. In 2019, the Colorado Department of Public Health sued Shell and the Army in the US District Court for hazardous chemicals from the Arsenal leaking into groundwater. The suit alleged that unsafe levels of organochlorine pesticides, heavy metals, chlorinated and aromatic solvents, and chemical agent degradation products and manufacturing byproducts had been found in groundwater. Litigation on that case is still ongoing.
At Rocky Flats, the controversy over the site’s past activities extended into its cleanup, with some opponents characterizing the proposed plans as “bait-and-switch.” Early in the cleanup process, the Energy Department funded an advisory committee that, in turn, established a “future site uses” working group. One of the working group’s recommendations was for residual plutonium contamination to be cleaned down to background level, to protect future area residents, no matter how long it would take. However, state officials assessed that a speedy cleanup that converted some areas into a National Wildlife Refuge was the desirable approach to protect outer metropolitan areas expanding toward the site boundaries.
The Energy Department and the site’s federal and state regulators agreed to limit the total costs of remediation and established a residual plutonium contamination limit in the top three feet of soil and a higher limit between three and six feet. (There was no contamination limit below six feet.) These limits were sufficient to qualify outer areas of Rocky Flats as a National Wildlife Refuge, and those areas were released to the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2006. Since then, the controversy has remained because the residual contamination is too high for unlimited uses of Rocky Flats.
Opposing the greenway
The city of Westminster is now the third municipal government to express concern over residual contamination at Rocky Flats. In 2016, the town of Superior, north of the site, voted to withdraw from the Rocky Mountain Greenway, a Federal Lands Access Program grant and project. The city and county of Broomfield followed suit in October 2020, unanimously approving a resolution for the withdrawal from the greenway. The Broomfield city council hired an environmental consultant to conduct soil sampling along the proposed Greenway, and the resolution expressed concern over the high levels of plutonium detected in the soil. After the resolution, the city stated that it would not contribute the $105,000 that was supposed to go to the Greenway project and would not allow Greenway-related construction work on Broomfield property.
The city of Broomfield also opposed another post-cleanup proposal—the Jefferson Parkway Highway Authority—described on its web page as a “privately-funded, publicly-owned regional toll road.” The proposed road would pass just outside the wildlife refuge, which was the eastern boundary of the former plutonium facility. The parkway authority had no plans to sample soil nearby until both Broomfield and a citizens advisory board recommended doing so before construction began. The authority then started sampling and, in September 2019, reported a sample containing 264 picocuries of plutonium per gram. (A picocurie is one trillionth of a curie, a measure of radioactivity.) This was much higher than the maximum limit of 50 picocuries per gram for surface contamination within the former industrial zone. Although this was the only sample above the limit, given the authority’s earlier resistance to sampling, the community lost faith in the project’s safety.
The Broomfield city council voted unanimously in February 2020 to withdraw from the Jefferson Parkway Association, removing a $70,000 annual payment in the process. In 2022, the county of Jefferson and city of Arvada sued Broomfield in response, claiming the parkway could not continue without that county’s continued participation. But a Colorado District Court judge dismissed that suit in December 2023, urging the parties to negotiate over Broomfield’s participation. The city and county of Broomfield expressed satisfaction with that decision, and the parkway’s future was described as “uncertain.”
In an escalatory move, in January 2024, the Colorado state chapter of the Physicians for Social Responsibility and five other groups filed a federal lawsuit in Washington D.C., seeking to prevent the greenway from coming through Rocky Flats. The plaintiffs sought to enjoin the US Federal Highway Administration, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and their respective cabinet departments (Transportation and Interior), from constructing an eight-mile trail through the most heavily plutonium-contaminated area of the wildlife refuge. (The filing assumed that the greenway would proceed from Westminster, but that city’s most recent decision to withdraw funds seems to require a different route.) According to the complaint, the city of Boulder has suggested since at least 2016 that the greenway path avoid Rocky Flats entirely.
The presiding judge, Timothy J. Kelley, denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction in September 2024. The case now awaits trial.
So far, concerns over Rocky Flats and its wildlife refuge have already limited public access to the refuge. Since April 2018, the Denver School District, the largest in the area, has forbidden its nearly 100,000 students from visiting Rocky Flats on field trips. Other school districts, including Boulder’s, had previously issued similar orders to protect their students.
It is still uncertain how the Trump administration will regard public participation, public protest, and the rule of law at Rocky Flats and other Superfund sites. The new Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, is the former chief executive of a fracking company based in Denver, a known climate change denier, and was on the boards of EMX Royalty, a Canadian company that seeks royalties from extractive mineral mining, and Oklo, Inc., which designs small modular nuclear reactors. Wright is now responsible for overseeing atomic weapons production, cleanup of former weapons facilities, and US energy policy in general. How Wright will interact with Colorado peace activists and environmental protection groups concerned about the defunct plutonium-contaminated weapons facility at Rocky Flats is unclear. But the fight over the future of this legacy site appears far from over.
Walt Zlotow: Trump pushing Ukraine peace for simple reason: he has no cards to play either.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 17 Mar 25
At his Oval Office kerfuffle with Ukraine President Zelensky, President Trump told Zelensky he had to make peace with Russia. This followed Zelensky’s plea for more US weapons to keep the war going till Ukraine prevails. Trump disabused him of that notion by saying “You have no cards to play”, colloquial for ‘Make peace, not war.’
Trump knows he has no cards to play as well in the ongoing peace negotiations in Saudi Arabia. That’s why he is anxious to end the war. He knows predecessor Biden made a catastrophic mistake provoking the war over 3 years ago. He knows Ukraine is on the brink of military collapse in spite of the $175 billion in weapons Biden poured into Ukraine that has merely turned it into a failed state. Trump knows Biden sabotaged the imminent peace treaty Putin and Zelensky were prepared to sign ending the war in its first 2 months.
He wants none of that disastrous Biden war policy attached to his foreign policy resume.
Every American, every Ukrainian, every Russian should support the Trump peace initiative that could end the war, bring security to the region, allow reconstruction of the 80% of what’s left of Ukraine, provide resumption of normal US Russia diplomatic relations. Most importantly, it will end the risk of this war going nuclear, a threat hanging over peoplekind every one of the 1,120 days of this totally unnecessary, lost war.
Trump didn’t change sides. He’s not abandoning an ally. He’s not a Russian agent. He’s not a traitor. Unlike Biden, he’s merely a realist who looked at his empty hand, saw Russian President Putin was holding 4 aces, and decided to walk away lest another 100,000 Ukrainians are needlessly sacrificed for America’s lust to control European geopolitics.
On this issue President Trump deserves our support.
They had a fairytale American childhood – but was radiation slowly killing them?
Decades later, federal investigators acknowledged an increased cancer risk for some people who played in the creek as children,
Sophie Williams, BBC News, Washington DC, 16 Mar 25
After Kim Visintine put her son to bed every night at a hospital in St Louis, Missouri, she spent her evening in the hospital’s library. She was determined to know how her boy had become seriously ill with a rare brain tumour at just a week old.
“Doctors were shocked,” she says. “We were told that his illness was one in a million. Other parents were learning to change diapers but I was learning how to change chemotherapy ports and IVs.”
Kim’s son Zack was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme. It is a brain tumour that is very rare in children and is usually seen in adults over 45.
Zack had chemotherapy treatments but doctors said there was no hope of him ever recovering. He died at just six years old.
Years later, social media and community chatter made Kim start to think that her son was not an isolated case. Perhaps he was part of a bigger picture growing in their community surrounding Coldwater Creek.
In this part of the US, cancer fears have prompted locals to accuse officials of not doing enough to support those who may have been exposed to radiation due to the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s.
A compensation programme that was designed to pay out to some Americans who contracted diseases after exposure to radiation expired last year – before it could be extended to the St Louis area.
This Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (Reca) provided one-time payouts to people who may have developed cancer or other diseases while living in areas where activities such as atomic weapons testing took place. It paid out $2.6bn (£2bn) to more than 41,000 claimants before coming to an end in 2024.
Benefits were paid to such neighbours, frequently called “downwinders”, in Arizona, Utah and Nevada, but not New Mexico, where the world’s first test of a nuclear weapon took place in 1945. Research published in 2020 by the National Cancer Institute suggested that hundreds of cancers in the area would not have occurred without radiation exposure.
St Louis, meanwhile, was where uranium was refined and used to help create the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. After World War Two ended, the chemical was dumped near the creek and left uncovered, allowing waste to seep into the area.
Decades later, federal investigators acknowledged an increased cancer risk for some people who played in the creek as children, but added in their report: “The predicted increases in the number of cancer cases from exposures are small, and no method exists to link a particular cancer with this exposure.”
The clean-up of the creek is still ongoing and is not expected to finish until 2038.
A new bill has been put forward in the House, and Josh Hawley, a US senator representing Missouri, says he has raised the issue with President Donald Trump.
When Kim flicks through her school yearbook, she can identify those who have become sick and those who have since passed away. The numbers are startling.
“My husband didn’t grow up in this area, and he said to me, ‘Kim, this is not normal. It seems like we’re always talking about one of your friends passing away or going to a funeral’,” she says.
Just streets away from the creek, Karen Nickel grew up spending her days near the water picking berries, or in the nearby park playing baseball. Her brother would often try and catch fish in Coldwater Creek.
“I always tell people that we had just the fairytale childhood that you would expect in what you consider suburban America,” says Karen. “Big backyards, big families, children playing out together until the street lights came on at night.”
But years later, her carefree childhood now looks very different.
“Fifteen people from the street I grew up on have died from rare cancers,” she says. “We have neighbourhoods here where every house has been affected by some cancer or some illness. We have streets where you can’t just find a house where a family has not been affected by this.”
When Karen’s sister was just 11 years old, doctors discovered that her ovaries were covered in cysts. The same had happened to their neighbour when she was just nine. Karen’s six-year-old granddaughter was born with a mass on her right ovary.
Karen helped found Just Moms STL, a group that is dedicated to protecting the community from future exposures that could be linked to cancers – and which advocates for a clean-up of the area.
“We get messages every day from people that are suffering from illnesses and are questioning whether this is from exposure,” she says. “These are very aggressive illnesses that the community is getting, from cancers all the way to autoimmune diseases.”
Teresa Rumfelt grew up just a street away from Karen and lived in her family home from 1979 until 2010. She remembers every one of her animals passing away from cancer and her neighbours getting ill from rare diseases.
Years later, her sister Via Von Banks was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of motor neurone disease. Some medical studies have suggested there could be a link between radiation and ALS, but this is not definitive – and more research needs to be done to firm it up.
That does not reassure people like Teresa who are concerned that more needs to be done to understand how locals are being affected.
“ALS took my sister at 50,” Teresa says. “I think it was the worst disease ever of mankind. When she was diagnosed in 2019, she’d just got her career going and her children were growing. She stayed positive through all of it.”
Like Hawley, Just STL Moms and other community members want the government’s compensation act to be expanded to include people within the St Louis area, despite the programme being in limbo after expiring.
Expanding it to the Coldwater Creek community would mean that locals could be offered compensation if they could prove they were harmed as a result of the Manhattan Project, during which the atomic bomb was developed with the help of uranium-processing in St Louis. It would also allow screenings and further study into illnesses other than cancer.
In a statement to the BBC, the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it took concerns very seriously and had actively worked with federal, state and local partners – as well as community members – to understand their health concerns, and to ensure community members were not exposed to the Manhattan Project-era waste.
The BBC has also contacted the US Army Corps of Engineers, which is leading the clean-up – but has not received a response to a request for comment.
“My sister would have loved to be part of the fight. She’d be the first to picket,” says Teresa of her efforts to get greater support from the government.
The trend in people around Coldwater Creek getting unwell has not gone unnoticed among healthcare professionals.
Dr Gautum Agarwal, a cancer surgeon at Mercy Hospital in St Louis, says he has not noticed a “statistical thing”, but notes that he has seen husbands and wives and their neighbours presenting cancers.
Now, he ensures that his patients are asked where they live and how close they are to Coldwater Creek.
“I tell them that there’s a potential that there’s a link. And if your neighbours or family live near there, we should get them screened more often. And maybe you should get your kids screened earlier.”
He hopes that over time more knowledge will be gained about the issue, and for a study into multi-cancer early detection tests to be introduced that could help catch any potential cancers, and help reassure people in the area……….. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2e7011n03vo
Uranium fever collides with industry’s dark past in Navajo country
Mining.com, Bloomberg News | January 14, 2025
A few miles south of the Grand Canyon, thousands of tons of uranium ore, reddish-gray, blue and radioactive, are piled up high in a clearing in the forest.
They’ve been there for months, stranded by a standoff between the mining company that dug them deep out of the ground, Energy Fuels Inc., and the leader of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren.
Back in the summer, Energy Fuels had triggered an uproar when it loaded some of the ore onto a truck, slapped a “radioactive” sign over the taillights and drove it through the heart of Navajo territory.
Radioactive is an alarming word anywhere, but here in Navajo country, surrounded by hundreds of abandoned uranium mines that powered America’s nuclear arms race with the USSR and spewed toxic waste into the land, it causes terror. Those fears have only grown the past couple years as nuclear power came back in vogue and sparked a uranium rush in mining camps all across the Southwest.
So when the news made it to Nygren that morning, he was furious. No one had sought his consent for the shipment. He quickly ordered dozens of police officers to throw on their sirens, fan out and intercept the truck.
The dragnet turned up nothing in the end — the truck snuck through — but the hard-line response delivered a warning, amplified over social media and ratified days later by the governor of Arizona, to the miners: Stay out of Navajo country.
Cut off from the lone processing mill in the US — all the main routes cut through Navajo territory — executives at Energy Fuels stockpiled it by the entrance of the mine. When the heaps of crushed rock grew too sprawling, they pulled the miners out of the tunnels and turned the drilling machines off…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Animosity towards mining companies runs high on Navajo land. It’s visible everywhere. On huge roadside billboards and small office signs, in fading pinks and yellows and jet blacks, too. They read “Radioactive Pollution Kills” and “Haul No” and, along the main entrance to Cameron, a hard-scrabble village on the territory’s western edge, “No Uranium Mining.”
A few miles down the road, big mounds of sand streaked gray and blue rise, one after the other, high above the vast desert landscape. They are the tailings from some of the uranium mines that were abandoned in the territory last century.
To Ray Yellowfeather, a 50-year-old construction worker, the tailings were always the “blue hills,” just one big playground for him and his childhood friends.
“We would climb up the blue hills and slide back down,” Yellowfeather says. “Nobody told us they were dangerous.”
Years later, they would be cordoned off by the Environmental Protection Agency as it began work to clean up the mines. By then, though, the damage was done. Like many around here, Yellowfeather says he’s lost several family members to stomach cancer. The last of them was his mother in 2022.
Yellowfeather admits he doesn’t know exactly what caused their cancer but, he says, “I have to think it has to do with the piles of radioactive waste all around us.” It’s in the construction material in many of the homes and buildings and in the aquifers, too. To this day, drinking water is shipped into some of the hardest-hit areas.
The US government has recognized the harm its nuclear arms projects have done to communities in the Southwest. In 1990, Congress passed a law to compensate victims who contracted cancer and other diseases. It paid out some $2.5 billion over the ensuing three decades. The EPA, meanwhile, has been in charge of the clean-up of the abandoned mines. Two decades after the program began, though, only a small percentage have been worked on at all.
This is giving mining companies an opportunity to curry favor in tribal communities by offering to take over and expedite the clean-up of some mines.
…………………………………………………………………………..the EPA released a detailed study on Pinyon Plain. In it, the agency found that operations at the mine could contaminate the water supply of the Havasupai, a tribe tucked in such a remote corner of the Grand Canyon that it receives mail by mule. The report emboldened Havasupai leaders to step up their opposition to the mine, adding to Chalmers’s growing list of problems.
For the Navajo, the risks that come from the hauling of uranium through its territory are far smaller — so negligible as to be almost non-existent, according to Chalmers. Nygren is unmoved. The Navajo have heard such reassurances many times before, he says, only to pay dearly in the end.
Nygren grew up near a cluster of old mines right along the territory’s Arizona-Utah border, which makes the whole Energy Fuels affair “incredibly personal,” he says. His voice grows louder now and his tone more emphatic, indignant. To him, the Energy Fuels incursion feels no different than all the abuses committed over the course of decades by the US government and the mining companies that supplied it with a steady stream of uranium.
“We played a big role in the national security of the United States and we played a big part in the Cold War, providing energy for nuclear weapons. We’ve done our part. And now it’s time for the US to do its part by cleaning up these mines and respecting our laws.” https://www.mining.com/web/uranium-fever-collides-with-industrys-dark-past-in-navajo-country/
State Police to Hold Major Radiological Incident Exercise with International, Federal, State and Local Partners
The Michigan State Police, Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division (MSP/EMHSD) is playing a lead role in the planning, hosting and execution of a historic full-scale radiological exercise. More than 70 local, state, provincial and federal agencies from the United States and Canada will participate in this major radiological incident exercise at various locations in Lansing, southeast Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Ontario from March 14 – 21.
The Cobalt Magnet 2025 exercise is led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), in partnership with the MSP/EMHSD. It will bring numerous agencies together to ensure preparedness against radiological threats.
“Michigan is home to two active nuclear power plants, with a third slated to return online within the next year,” said Col. James F. Grady II, director of the Michigan State Police and state director of emergency management and homeland security. “Given our location near Canada and other Great Lakes states, Michigan is uniquely positioned to play a critical role in this vital exercise, where the lessons learned will improve safety and response actions impacting the nation and beyond.”
Cobalt Magnet 2025 represents the culmination of 18 months of planning by local, state, provincial and federal responders. The exercise, with more than 3,000 participants, will simulate a nuclear power plant accident. It will enable response personnel to practice scanning for radiological materials, protecting public health and safety, providing emergency relief to affected populations and restoring essential services.
“During the exercise, members of the public may see field teams in protective clothing using radiological monitoring and detection equipment, low-flying aircraft conducting data-gathering overflights and groups of first responders and others staged at various locations,” explained Capt. Kevin Sweeney, deputy state director of Emergency Management and commander of the MSP/EMHSD. “The MSP/EMHSD will host a large portion of the Cobalt Magnet 25 exercise at the State Emergency Operations Center at MSP Headquarters in Dimondale. Multiple State of Michigan agencies will join the MSP in this full-scale exercise.”
Cobalt Magnet 2025 is part of a regular program of training, exercises and planning that help first responders prepare in case of a public health and safety emergency.
For more information on how to prepare before, during and after an emergency or disaster, visit www.michigan.gov/miready or follow MSP/EMHSD on X at @MichEMHS.
Walt Zlotow – GOP intervention needed to remove disintegrating Trump from office
Walt Zlotow, Glen Ellyn, 14 Mar 25
It took nearly 4 years to Democrats to stage an intervention to remove a mentally disintegrating Joe Biden from office.
We cannot wait that long for GOP to do their version with a disintegrating Donald Trump.
That’s because his disintegration is compounded by a malevolent streak of vindictiveness, revenge, lust for dictatorial power, gleeful dismantling of the American safety net maintaining the commons never before experienced in American history.
Annoy him and he’ll call you Asian if you’re black; Palestinian if you’re a Jew. That is sick.
Trying to salvage Musk’s sinking Tesla brand, he morphed into a sleazy car salesman pitching Tesla cars as his smug governmental wrecking ball looked on.
His obsession with tariffs has spooked Wall Street, every sensible economist, every trading partner and Joe Sixpack watching his retirement drop while his costs of necessities rise. He appears detached from reality of the economic deluge he’s unleashing.
His congressional speech sounded more like an indoor Nuremburg Rally than a prescription for healing America. His idolatrous congressional Republicans roared their approval. Apparently oblivious they’re standing on the deck of the Titanic along with the Democrats, they jeered them for not saluting America’s first autocratic president.
Whether it’s sliming critics, stealing foreign territory, gutting government, snipping the social safety net, provoking self-destructive trade war, Trump’s delusions of grandeur increase daily.
There is historical precedent for Republicans staging an intervention to remove a morally compromised president. In 1974 a GOP intervention led by Sen. Barry Goldwater visited morally compromised President Nixon in the White House and convinced him to resign. Such an intervention by today’s GOP, while virtually inconceivable, is still critically needed to prevent an unprecedented collapse of every vestige of the American promise to its citizenry.
If morally centered Barry Goldwater were in the Senate today, he’d likely step up to lead the Trump intervention. Alas, knowing the makeup of today’s GOP, it might be an intervention of one.
Poisoning the well – The toxic legacy of Cold War uranium mining in western New Mexico
Studies have shown that chronic exposure to uranium through drinking water can cause kidney damage and cardiovascular disease. When inhaled, uranium can lead to lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lung tissue. Studies of uranium miners associate cumulative exposure to radon with higher rates of death by lung cancer.
Proving that one’s illness originated as a result of living near a mine or mill, as opposed to actually working in it, is nearly impossible, given that symptoms can take years to manifest — a lack of clear causation that is ultimately advantageous to polluters.
Near the western New Mexico town of Grants, the toxic legacy of Cold War uranium mining and milling has shattered lives, destroyed homes and created a contamination threat to the last clean source of groundwater for an entire region
SEARCHLIGHT NEW MEXICO, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, March 13, 2025 [ excellent pictures and maps]
Driving along a stretch of New Mexico Highway 605, just north of the tiny Village of Milan, it’s easy to imagine that this area has always been no-man’s-land. Little appears in the distance except for a smattering of homes and trees peppered by expanses of bone-dry scrub brush. But a hard second look reveals something else — vestiges of a mass departure. Sidewalks lead to nowhere, a dog house sits in the middle of a field next to a mound of cinder blocks, phone lines crisscross empty stretches of land and deserted propane tanks and mailboxes sit perched in front of nothing. Around the bend on one unpaved side road, a neighborhood watch sign stands sentinel where a neighborhood no longer exists…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
This home site was once part of a cluster of five rural subdivisions interspersed with rich farm and ranchland. The Homestake Mining Company — famously known for gold mining in the Black Hills of South Dakota — took up residence here in 1958, to mill uranium. From that year until 1990, millions of tons of ore were prised from nearby mines and processed at Homestake, where the ore was ground into fine particles and leached with a solution that coaxed out pure uranium oxide, often called “yellowcake.” That uranium was then shipped off to help make America’s Cold War fleet of nuclear weapons or to power nuclear reactors. The leftover slurry was piped into two unlined earthen pits, the largest the size of 50 football fields and filled with over 21 million tons of uranium mill tailings.
Over time, the uranium tailings decayed into radon gas; meanwhile, radioactive contaminants seeped into four of the region’s aquifers. Residents compiled a list of neighbors who died of cancer — they called it the Death Map. In 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) predicted that the probability of developing cancer was notably higher for residents who lived closest to the mill, especially if they drank the water.
In the intervening decades, Homestake attempted to hold its remaining contamination at bay rather than offer a long-term solution. That changed in 2020, when the company declared that a full cleanup of the groundwater was not feasible and instead embarked on a mass buyout and demolition of homes inside the rural subdivisions and beyond, Boomer and Billiman’s included. Homestake’s goal, ultimately, is to hand over 6,100 acres of land — almost twice the size of nearby Milan — to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of a special federal program that takes over shuttered nuclear outfits when industry walks away. The deadline is 2035. And if this site is anything like the majority of the DOE’s other sites, the land will be rendered inaccessible to the public, with the company’s guarantee that toxins will stay inside the massive contamination zone boundary for a thousand years.
“Talk about the myth of containment,” says Christine Lowery, a commissioner in Cibola County. “The myth of reclamation as well,” she adds. For Lowery, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna who lives in Paguate, one of its six villages — itself blighted by the Jackpile-Paguate Uranium Mine, one of the world’s largest open pit uranium mines — the subtext is clear. “What they should be saying is, ‘We’ve contaminated everything we can, and there’s no way we can fix it.’”
In fact, the conditions necessary for contaminants to infiltrate a fifth aquifer in a single generation — not a thousand years — could already be in the making. The aquifer in question is the San Andres-Glorieta, so ancient that its limestone was forged from the same material as seashells before the era of the dinosaurs. It’s also the last clean source of groundwater for Milan, the county seat of Grants, many private well owners and the Pueblo of Laguna, as well as the Pueblo of Acoma, one of the longest continually inhabited communities in the United States.
According to regulators, the San Andres-Glorieta still meets standards for groundwater that is safe to use and drink. According to Homestake’s own reports, however, at least three uranium plumes are converging toward what Ann Maest, an aqueous geochemist with Buka Environmental, a Colorado-based firm, calls “a bull’s-eye of radioactive contamination.” The potential target? A geological formation called a subcrop. Here, approximately 100 feet below the surface of the earth and three miles southwest of the Homestake site, this subcrop directly connects the San Andres-Glorieta with an overlying aquifer long known to transport contamination from two uranium mills including Homestake. In 2022, the company commissioned an independent firm to study the geological feature. But according to a memo sent to state and federal regulators and written by Maest the following year, the findings were “light on interpretation” and evaded answering the most important question of all: Have those contaminants reached the San Andres-Glorieta?………………………
Gauging the extent of groundwater plumes is notoriously difficult. Topography and geology shape how groundwater moves, and sampling can underestimate the full range of a plume, leaving gaps in the data, whether that’s inadvertent or intentional. A 2022 ProPublica investigation found that regulators had been lax in their oversight of the Homestake mill, its toxic footprint and the uranium industry as a whole. Over time, a dizzying array of state and federal agencies have each overseen a different aspect of the site’s reclamation; in the past, those agencies haven’t even agreed on what that reclamation should look like.
Now, as uranium mining undergoes a national revival under initiatives that favor carbon-free nuclear energy, waste from the previous Cold War era of mining and milling endures. Homestake’s remediation — which has gone on for 49 years — exemplifies this legacy. During that time, company reports say, its collection wells have pumped out billions of gallons of contaminated water. Nearly one million pounds of uranium have been removed from the groundwater, too. Bingham says this represents 85 percent of the total uranium that was released into the environment. That’s in addition to the removal of tens of thousands of pounds of selenium and over a million pounds of molybdenum.
The company has attempted to keep pollutants that have seeped into groundwater from migrating farther away from the source. But this so-called hydraulic barrier has only addressed the symptoms of the contamination, not the cause: the tailings piles, which the company declined to relocate into a lined repository nearby. That means that some groundwater contamination continues to spread beyond Homestake’s site. The hydraulic barrier has another drawback — it has used “a massive amount of freshwater from the San Andres-Glorieta aquifer to operate,” says Laura Watchempino, a member of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE), a grassroots network of uranium-impacted communities working collectively to address the legacy of mining and milling on the health and environment of future generations. Watchempino is a former lawyer who also worked as a water quality specialist for the Pueblo of Acoma………………………………………………………………………………..
………………………………………………………………….Carver estimates that he is one of around 30 holdouts left in the five subdivisions; four of the families live in his own, Murray Acres. But few others have spent so much time fighting to hold the company accountable. “I’m 85 and it all started when I was 40,” he says.
In 1983, he was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the company, which argued, among other claims, that contamination of the well water had “completely destroyed the market value of the plaintiffs’ properties.” As part of the settlement, the company made small cash payments to residents and hooked them up to the municipal water system, which drew from the last clean source of water in the region, the San Andres-Glorieta. That year, the mill was designated a Superfund site, and in 1987 the company entered into a consent order with the EPA to analyze radon levels in residents’ homes, the product of uranium decaying from the tailings piles.
The mill closed in 1990, less than a decade after the uranium industry went bust. Records from the county assessor’s office show that Homestake quietly began buying a handful of homes in adjacent neighborhoods as early as 1996. (In 2001, Homestake Mining merged with the Canadian juggernaut, Barrick Gold, one of the world’s largest gold mining companies.)
“Every time someone dies or decides to move away, Homestake-Barrick Gold buys the property at a greatly reduced cost, which they can do because their ineffective groundwater remediation has devalued property many of us worked lifetimes to build,” Candace Head-Dylla, a former resident, said in a 2017 letter to the NRC.
In 2020, the company argued that it was no longer technically practical to clean up the groundwater to match its pre-mill days, Bingham wrote. So began the tangled regulatory process of applying for a less-stringent cleanup standard through the NR……………………………………
Searchlight asked the DOE for comment, but the agency declined. According to Samah Shaiq, a former DOE spokesperson, the agency is not yet responsible for the site.
The NRC denied Homestake’s application for the lower standard — the basis of the buyout — but the company remains steadfast in its desire to walk away. As part of those plans, Homestake has already scooped up approximately 455 of the estimated 523 properties that sit inside its proposed boundary, an expanse that’s nearly as large as the most contaminated area of the Rocky Flats Plant, another of the more than 100 sites under the DOE’s perpetual care, where thousands of plutonium bomb cores for the nation’s nuclear arsenal were fabricated between 1952 and 1989.
Much of Milan, along with huge swaths of land west and north, including some five miles of Highway 605, sit within this massive pie-shaped chunk, a proposed boundary that is based on the company’s groundwater modeling data. Inside are public water and electric lines, groundwater wells, septic systems and other, smaller roads, the fate of which have yet to be determined. Milan Elementary School sits only a mile away from the boundary’s southernmost rim.
When Searchlight asked how fast those plumes are migrating, drawing on a Homestake-produced simulation that’s meant to predict how contaminants move in groundwater aquifers at the site, the EPA declined to comment, because the simulation was still in draft form.
Regulators, meanwhile, are plodding through the process of determining what final act of remediation they should require before allowing Homestake to hand off the site to the DOE. But prospects for that remedy depend on whether and when the company will receive a lower cleanup threshold. If a lower standard is settled on, that remedy, whatever it may be, will fall radically short of truly protecting groundwater, advocates believe. Adding to the uncertainty is a recent announcement that the Trump administration intends to cut personnel at the EPA by up to 65 percent.
The future of the site seems all but predetermined: a wasteland in the truest sense, and a national sacrifice zone. The buyout, a prologue to this future, has fractured residents’ lives in the present. Homestake subjected sellers to nondisclosure agreements — “standard business practice,” in Bingham’s words — but to some in the community, a mechanism for silencing dissent……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
“We’ve been poisoned to the gills”
The Grants Mining District stretches from the Pueblo of Laguna to Gallup, across almost 100 miles of western New Mexico’s red bluffs. Uranium here and throughout the world is ancient even by cosmic standards………………………………………………………
…………………………..in time, more than 150 mines would be developed across this district and the greater San Mateo Creek Basin, and, today, there are a total of 261 former uranium mines statewide, making New Mexico the fourth-largest producer of uranium globally, behind East Germany, the Athabasca Basin and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which supplied much of the uranium for the Manhattan Project.
But with the uranium boom came a wave of devastation across the greater Southwest, including in Indigenous communities like the Pueblo of Laguna, as well as the Navajo Nation, where there are more than 500 abandoned uranium mines. Workers often lived near mines and mills and would bring yellowcake home on their clothes, exposing their families to harmful radioactive dust; water sources, meanwhile, have shown “elevated levels of radiation,” according to the EPA.
In the Church Rock Chapter of the Navajo Nation, a tailings dam breached on an early July morning in 1979, sending contaminated water into the Rio Puerco. Today, it constitutes the largest release of nuclear materials in the U.S. worse even than the meltdown at Three Mile Island.
Church Rock was among the eight mills that processed uranium ore in New Mexico. Others include Homestake and, in its immediate vicinity, Bluewater and two mills at Ambrosia Lake. Workers flocked here from across the state and nation during the booming 1960s and 1970s, with Homestake alone employing 1,500 people at its peak.
After graduating from high school and intermittently through his college years, Carver worked stints at all four of those mills before opening his own business, Carver Oil. At Homestake, he worked at a site where yellowcake was processed and packaged into barrels to go to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it would be enriched for use in nuclear weapons. He also worked in the tailings piles.
Carver now receives benefits for spots on his lungs from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), a program he qualified for because of his time working in the mills. Whether his illness was compounded by living near the mill tailings and by breathing excess radon, or by drinking the water — at least until the company connected residents to a clean source — is unknown. Studies have shown that chronic exposure to uranium through drinking water can cause kidney damage and cardiovascular disease. When inhaled, uranium can lead to lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lung tissue. Studies of uranium miners associate cumulative exposure to radon with higher rates of death by lung cancer.
Maggie Billiman, who’s from the Sawmill Chapter of the Navajo Nation, has advocated for RECA to cover people in New Mexico and parts of Arizona who lived downwind of atmospheric nuclear tests or who worked in mines after 1971, the current cutoff date. Last fall, she traveled with other Indigenous activists to Washington, D.C., as part of her efforts to expand RECA after struggling with various undiagnosed illnesses for years; several painful cysts that have yet to be biopsied were recently found on her liver and pancreas. Many doctor visits later, she’s still pursuing a clear diagnosis and treatment plan.
But whether or how one gets sick can depend on biological sex, age when exposed and the pathway a certain type of radioactive particle takes to enter the body. Proving that one’s illness originated as a result of living near a mine or mill, as opposed to actually working in it, is nearly impossible, given that symptoms can take years to manifest — a lack of clear causation that is ultimately advantageous to polluters.
Groundwater contamination from uranium mining was detected as early as 1961. Even before that, the federal government was aware that New Mexico’s waterways were already showing signs of radioactive contamination from the burgeoning uranium extraction industry. It would take another 15 years for Homestake to begin a convoluted, if limited, remediation effort: A series of collection wells would pull contaminated water out and treat it, then pump that water, along with clean water sourced from the San Andres-Glorieta, back into the subsurface.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. It’s hard to visualize such an underground fortification — on maps, it looks like a cashew-shaped moat that wraps around the west and south sides of the large tailings pile — or the timescale needed for its maintenance. In 1982, Homestake said it would “require operation for a considerable amount of time.” In response, NMED declared that Homestake had to commit to operating the system until it “can be demonstrated that contaminants in the groundwater will not exceed New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission standards off Homestake’s property in the foreseeable future.”
Advocates believe that means forever. If barrier maintenance is stopped, experts contend that highly contaminated groundwater will migrate southward and downward and eventually make its way to the subcrop, an entry point into the San Andres-Glorieta, municipal supply wells for Milan and Grants and eventually the Río San José. “This signals a bleak future for the stream system and for future generations,” Laura Watchempino warns.
Bluewater’s plume is coming from the northwest; Homestake’s plumes from the northeast. Models show that all are converging, like a Venn diagram, in a location where groundwater flows toward the subcrop. On one side, the hydraulic barrier is warding off some of that pollution, but when it stops operation completely, those contaminants will very likely infiltrate the San Andres-Glorieta, according to NMED.
In the past, it’s been difficult to discern what contaminants belong to what polluter, especially when they mingle, as is the case here. But in 2019, the USGS published the findings of a study that “fingerprinted” such mine and mill contaminants to show their point of origin……………………….
…………………………………….. “We’ve been poisoned to the gills,” says Christine Lowery, the Cibola county commissioner. “The question is: How do we recover and live with contamination?”
Alicia Inez Guzmán
Raised in the northern New Mexican village of Truchas, Alicia Inez Guzmán has written about histories of place, identity and land use in New Mexico. She brings this knowledge to her current role at Searchlight, where she focuses on nuclear issues and the impacts of the nuclear industry. The former senior editor of New Mexico Magazine, Alicia holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in New York. More by Alicia Inez Guzmán https://searchlightnm.org/new-mexico-cold-war-uranium-mining-toxic-legacy-threat-homes-underground-aquifers/?utm_source=Searchlight+New+Mexico&utm_campaign=d2d0fd81fc-3%2F13%2F2025+%E2%80%93+Poisoning+the+well&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8e05fb0467-d2d0fd81fc-395610620&mc_cid=d2d0fd81fc&mc_eid=a70296a261
Eight Reasons Why Nuclear Power is Not the Answer for Hawaii
by Sherry Pollack, 14 Mar 25
Nuclear power isn’t “zero emission.” The nuclear industry has conducted a propaganda campaign rife with factually inaccurate information, including that nuclear power is “carbon-free electricity.” However, this could not be further from the truth. To be clear, there is no such thing as a zero- or close-to-zero emission nuclear reactor. Even existing reactors emit due to the continuous mining and refining of uranium needed for the reactor.
Transporting nuclear fuel is a hazard. As an isolated island chain, Hawaii faces unique and significant risks in transporting nuclear fuel over vast ocean distances. Any accidents during transport, be it from bringing fuel here or shipping waste back, could have catastrophic consequences for Hawaii’s pristine marine environment and tourism-dependent economy.
Nuclear waste. The waste generated by nuclear reactors remains radioactive for thousands of years and needs to be kept contained throughout that time. Currently, there are no long-term storage solutions for radioactive waste, and most is stored in temporary, above-ground facilities.
Hawaii’s geological instability, including frequent earthquakes, volcanic activity, and tsunami risks, makes it an unsafe location for storing nuclear waste. There are no viable long-term solutions for safely containing radioactive materials in such a volatile environment.
Accidents. Human error and natural disasters can lead to dangerous and immensely costly accidents. Think Red Hill but multiply that exponentially. Direct costs would include cleanup operations, property damage, and evacuation efforts, as well as significant indirect costs including long-term health consequences, economic disruption due to lost productivity and tourism, and severe psychological impacts on affected populations, often lasting for generations. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the emergency planning zone around a nuclear power plant typically extends to a 10-mile radius for immediate radiation exposure concerns, while a broader “ingestion pathway” zone reaches out to a 50-mile radius where food and water contamination could occur in the event of an incident. This would make safely siting a power plant, particularly on Oahu, impossible.
Impacts on Local Communities and Ecosystems. In addition to the significant risk of cancer associated with fallout from nuclear disasters, studies also show increased risk for those who reside near a nuclear power plant, especially for childhood cancers such as leukemia. Workers in the nuclear industry are also exposed to higher-than-normal levels of radiation, and as a result are at a higher risk of death from cancer.
Nuclear energy is too expensive. To protect the climate, we must reduce the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time. Nuclear power does none of this. A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that even small modular reactors (SMRs) are expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning from fossil fuels in the coming 10-15 years.
Integral Fast Reactors, Pebble Bed Modular Reactors, Thorium Fueled Reactors, Molten Salt Reactors, and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are not viable. Nuclear power advocates promote small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis. However, proponents of SMRs and these other so called “new” types of reactors fail to address their unproven nature, unresolved safety risks, and economic inefficiency. Moreover, SMRs cannot be counted on to provide ‘firm’ power as has been touted. Just like today’s nuclear plants, SMRs will be vulnerable to extreme weather events or other disasters that could cause a loss of offsite power and force them to shut down. Additionally, the push for SMRs often serves the private interests of billionaires looking to power AI data centers rather than benefiting the people of Hawaii. Bottom line, SMRs are wishful thinking rooted in misinformation.
Nuclear power is an expensive distraction undermining our ability to achieve our clean energy goals. Investment in nuclear power, including SMRs, will take resources away from carbon-free and lower-cost renewable technologies that are available today and can push the transition from fossil fuels forward significantly in the coming decade. Hawaii is already on the path to achieving 100% renewable energy by 2045. Nuclear power is not renewable, requires costly infrastructure, and pursuing it would divert attention and resources from proven, sustainable solutions like solar, and wind.
Nuclear power has NO place in Hawaii’s clean energy future. Nuclear power is too dirty, too dangerous, and too expensive. It is environmentally harmful and produces waste that will be a burden on future generations. Accordingly, we urge the legislature to commit to uphold Hawaii’s constitution, a sustainable future, prioritize investing our resources in a clean renewable energy future, and honor the voices of its people by opposing the use of nuclear power in Hawaii.
Chris Hedges: Trump’s Christian Fascists and the War on Palestine
the usual absurdity that the Hebrew Bible, written 4,000 years ago, can be used to draw contemporary national borders.
March 11, 2025, By Chris Hedges / ScheerPost
Christian Nationalists who form the bedrock of support for Donald Trump — 80 percent voted for Trump in the last election according to a voter survey by the Associated Press — have mounted a concerted campaign calling on the White House to back Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.
This campaign includes visits to Israel by prominent leaders, including Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins and Mario Bramnick, petitioning the White House, lobbying Congress and calls for annexation at Christian conferences, including a resolution of support for Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank adopted at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference. The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Convention in Dallas, in March, gathered over 200 signatures from pastors and right-wing religious leaders from across the United States calling for the annexation of “Judea and Samaria” — the purported biblical name for the West Bank —and declaring the two state solution “a failed experiment.”
American Christian Leaders for Israel, which says it represents a network of “over 3,000 organizational leaders from across the nation, including the National Religious Broadcasters,” endorsed the NRB resolution and sent it to Trump. Congresswoman Claudia Tenney and five other members of the congressional “Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus,” sent a letter to Trump asking to “recognize the right of Israel” to declare sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories, arguing that it will advance “the Judeo-Christian heritage on which our nation was founded.”
Trump, who rescinded a Biden administration executive order that sanctioned Jewish colonists in the West Bank for human rights violations, promised, on Feb. 4, to make an announcement in the “next four weeks,” about possible annexation of the West Bank. This follows Trump’s call for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and death threats to the Palestinians unless they release Israeli hostages. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.
The agenda of Zionist extremists and Christian fascists, who hold senior positions throughout the Trump administration, have long converged. The language, iconography and symbolism used by the Christian and Jewish fascists is biblical. But the bonds are political, not religious.
I detail the history and ideology of our homegrown fascism and its kinship with Jewish fascism in my book, “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”
Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Baptist minister, has been nominated by Trump to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has said there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” and asserted that Palestinian identity is “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.” He proposes that any Palestinian state should be created outside of Israel in neighboring countries such as Egypt, Syria or Jordan. He dismisses the two-state solution as “irrational and unworkable.”
“I believe the scripture. Genesis 12: Those who bless Israel will be blessed; those who curse Israel will be cursed. I want to be on the blessing side, not the curse side,” Huckabee says.
John Ratcliffe, appointed by Trump to run the Central Intelligence Agency, advocates assisting Israel in what he described as its “foot-on-their-throat” approach against Iran.
Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who argues that “Zionism and Americanism are the front-lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today” — pedals the usual absurdity that the Hebrew Bible, written 4,000 years ago, can be used to draw contemporary national borders…………………………………………………………………………………….
Jewish supremacy, like the supremacy of the Christian fascists, is, these fanatics claim, sanctified by God. The slaughter of the Palestinians, who Benjamin Netanyahu compared to the biblical Amalekites, are the incarnate of evil and deserve to be massacred. Euro-Americans in the American colonies used the same biblical passage to justify the genocide of Native Americans. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those inside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism or Christian nationalism speak…………………………………………………………………………….. more https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/11/chris-hedges-trumps-christian-fascists-and-the-war-on-palestine/
US makes fresh push for World Bank to back nuclear power
New administration wants Washington-based multilateral lender to help the west
compete with China and Russia.
The World Bank is facing renewed calls from
its biggest shareholder to drop a decades-old ban on funding nuclear power
to help the west compete with China and Russia in atomic diplomacy. French
Hill, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has signalled that
the new US administration will continue to support the push to fund nuclear
projects just months ahead of a crucial decision on the contentious ban.
FT 9th March 2025
https://www.ft.com/content/e5e497a3-0c61-46a2-9a50-91757e7f1a61
How many nuclear weapons does the United States have in 2025?
10 Mar 2025
Since 1987, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published the Nuclear Notebook, an authoritative accounting of world nuclear arsenals compiled by top experts from the Federation of American Scientists.
Today, it is prepared by Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, and Mackenzie Knight of FAS.
This video explores the United States’ nuclear arsenal, which is currently undergoing a broad modernization effort to replace every nuclear delivery system over the next decade. You can read more from the Nuclear Notebook about other nuclear arsenals here: https://thebulletin.org/nuclear-noteb… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vsNKk9vkIE
US Threatens Possible Military Response After Tehran Rejects Nuclear Outreach
The White House again warned Tehran that it can be dealt with either through military means or by reaching a deal over its nuclear program, remarks that came hours after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected a US proposal for negotiations between the two bitter rivals.
“We hope the Iran Regime puts its people and best interests ahead of terror,” White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said in a statement on March 9 while reiterating remarks by President Donald Trump that “if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.”
In an interview with Fox Business recorded on March 6, Trump said, “There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal” to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
“I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing,'” Trump said.
“I would rather negotiate a deal. I’m not sure that everybody agrees with me, but we can make a deal that would be just as good as if you won militarily,” Trump added.
“But the time is happening now. The time is coming up. Something’s going to happen one way or the other.”
Snippets of the interview were aired on March 7, but the full sit-down will be broadcast on March 9, Fox said.
In separate comments to reporters, Trump said: “We have a situation with Iran that, something’s going to happen very soon. Very, very soon.”
Ali Khamenei, speaking on March 8 to a group of Iranian officials — without specifically mentioning Trump or the United States — said, “Their talks are not aimed at solving problems.”
“It is for…’Let’s talk to impose what we want on the other party that is sitting on the opposite side of the table.'”
“The insistence of some bullying governments on negotiations is not to resolve issues…. Talks for them is a pathway to have new demands; it is not only about Iran’s nuclear issue…. Iran will definitely not accept their expectations,” Khamenei was quoted by state media as saying.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on March 8 said Tehran had not yet received a letter from Trump……………………………… more https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-trump-nuclear-khamenei-negotiations/33341412.html
Families sickened by radiation exposure want Congress to revive this key compensation program.
7 Mar 2025
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act or RECA, first enacted in 1990, created a compensation program to process claims from people exposed to radiation leftover from nuclear testing done by the U.S. government.
After the latest expansion of the bill expired in June 2024, communities across the country, including Missouri and the Navajo Nation say they are waiting for the legislation to not only be taken up again, but also to include communities like theirs that were never originally included. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0icfLF6AVEQ
How the Media Walked us into Autocracy (w/ Ralph Nader) | The Chris Hedges Report
They’re abusing them for the profits they want to make from advertising, which of course begins to replace journalists and editors who want to do the right thing with journalists and editors who got their finger to the wind and are worried about the money before reporting the truth in an equitable fashion. It even gets worse. The Times created Trump. They kept giving him more and more publicity. They created JD Vance. Whoever heard of JD Vance? They kept writing about his book.
By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report, 9 Mar 25
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
The American corporate coup d’état is almost complete as the first weeks of the Trump administration exemplify. If there has been one person who saw this coming, and has taken courageous action over the years to prevent it, it would be Ralph Nader. The former presidential candidate, consumer advocate and corporate critic joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle his life’s work battling the corporate takeover of the country and how Americans can still fight back today despite the growing repression from the White House.
“The sign of a decaying democracy is that when the forces of plutocracy, oligarchy, multinational corporations increase their power, in all sectors of our society, the resistance gets weaker,” Nader tells Hedges.
Nader asks people to look around them and witness the decay through the ordinary parts of their lives. “If you just look at the countervailing forces that hold up a society—civilized norms, due process of law and democratic traditions—they’re all either AWOL [absent without official leave] or collapsing,” he said. Civic groups are outnumbered by corporate lobbyists, the media barely pays attention to any grassroots organizing and the protests that do occur, such as the encampments at universities, are brutally suppressed.
It’s not an impossible task, Nader says, recalling the precedent of organizing in the U.S. He says the fundamental basics are supported by a majority of people regardless of their political labels.
Chris Hedges
The New York Times published a lead column on January 18th, 2025, titled, “Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?” The columnist’s answer is yes, unless, and I quote, “defenders of democracy have to stay united, focusing on ensuring that checks and balances remain intact and that crucial democratic watchdog institutions elude capture.” What is absent from the Times article is the complicity of the media, and especially the New York Times, in shutting down coverage of the fight by unions, grassroots movements, whistleblowers, and civic organizations, often led by the consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, to placate their advertisers. This decision, made by newspapers such as the New York Times four decades ago, essentially erased these popular initiatives from public consciousness.
This erasure—done to placate wealthy corporations and oligarchs and boost revenue—bolstered the power of corporations and the government to dominate and shape public discourse and in the process saw them become ever more secretive and ever more autocratic. As Ralph Nader notes, the regular reporting about what activists were doing in the 1960s and 1970s made possible the consumer, environmental, labor, and freedom of information laws. Similar efforts now cannot gather momentum with media invisibility. Legislative hearings, prosecutions, and regulatory actions cannot get jump-started just by the people insistent on a just and democratic society. How often do you see op-eds from civic labor advocates, Ralph asks. How often do you read reviews of their books? How often do you see profiles of them?
How often have the groundbreaking studies by Public Citizen, Common Cause, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Veterans for Peace, Union of Concerned Scientists, etc. received coverage? This erasure stands in stark contrast to the coverage given over to those on the far right and corporations. Figures like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Elon Musk get plenty of press. The media landscape is siloed. Media outlets, both the legacy media and the digital media, cater to well-defined demographics. But the power of the legacy media, should it decide to use its power, is to help set the agenda through its reporting. Most digital sites feed off of the reporting of the establishment media spinning it left or right. And what it does not cover often does not get covered. Legions of reporters, 500 full-time reporters cover the Congress, hundreds more sit at the feet of the titans of commerce and Wall Street, spit back to the public official communiques, and fawning interviews with the powerful, the famous, and the rich. Unless they are deployed outside the halls of Congress and the centers of power, what is left of our democracy, and not much of it is left, will wither and die.
Joining me to discuss our march towards tyranny, the complicity of institutions such as the media and the liberal class, including the Democratic Party, and what we must do to wrest back power is Ralph Nader, who has been fighting corporate power longer more effectively and with more integrity than any other American. Ralph, let’s go back to where we were because where we are now is a reaction to what you, you were at the epicenter of it, built. We can begin with your groundbreaking book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which should be taught in every journalism school. It is a masterful piece of investigative reporting. But let’s go back to what we had and then how they organized to take it away.
Ralph Nader
Yeah, thank you, Chris. It’s very well documented, the whole history of it. When I wrote the book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a reporter for Science Magazine picked it up and then the New York Times picked it up off of Science Magazine and it made page one. And so that was a good start.
Chris Hedges
Ralph, just want to interrupt for people who don’t know, these were cars made by GM that were not safe…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Chris Hedges
Let me just stop you because Ralph, let’s not bypass the fact that GM mounted a pretty intense and dirty campaign against you.
Ralph Nader
Yes, they hired a private detective with several former FBI people. That’s what happened to a lot of FBI agents when they retired, they go to work for these large corporations to follow me around the country, try to get dirt on me, to discredit my testimony before Congress. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………….. Ralph Nader
Yes, and at the same time the companies hired a firm called Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering and Lloyd Cutler would go and have meetings with editors of the New York Times and Post and saying, what are you guys doing giving this guy so much print? Don’t you know he’s bad for business? And the inference was that they were going to lose advertising if they didn’t shut us out. Once the Times started scaling down, then the Washington Post took note because they were of the same mindset and both of them were about to go public and sell stock on the stock exchange, which gave them even more vulnerability to suppression. And then that dried up more and more of the evening news. We used to get on the network news.
It’s almost impossible to get on the network evening news now. And the same with radio. At the same time, there emerged public radio and public broadcasting, and they were scared from the get-go that the companies would go after their funding on Capitol Hill and crimp their style. And so they covered us very little as well.
……………………………………………………….the cycle starts again against the whole set of new injustices. But all these forces I’ve just mentioned started shutting us down. We were saved for a short period by the Jimmy Carter administration. He appointed very good people to the regulatory agencies, the auto safety agency, the job safety agency, the EPA, and so on. But that was just a four-year reprieve and they were still counter-attacking. More lobbyists, more political action committees, more indignant calls to reporters and editors and publishers to shut us down. So, you know, that was their golden age, the mass media, what we call now the corporate media. And it’s completely changed now. And I say to reporters or editors, or publishers that I can manage to reach. It’s not easy. What are you ashamed of your golden age for? Look what you did for the country, just exercising your duty and professional responsibilities for newsworthiness. And now you don’t do it.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. we’re paying the price now in wars of empire, in the domination of corporate supremacists over everything.
They’re raising our children with that iPhone five, seven hours a day, undermining parental authority, separating these children from family, community, nature, harming their health with junk food and sedentary living, with very little kids playing outside anymore. There isn’t anything that corporate commercialism now has not invaded. They’ve commercialized the churches. They’ve commercialized the academic world. They’ve commercialized almost everything outside the marketplace they see as a profit center. So they want to corporatize the post office. They want to take over public drinking water departments and corporatize them. They want to corporatize the public school system. One way or another, they want to corporatize the public lands or take the public lands. And they’ve never been more aggressive, never been more successful. And the civic community, which used to be relied on to resist, can’t get any media. And we have tried. Last year, we made a major effort to turn Labor Day into a real workers day with events all over the country. We got the unions behind us……………………………………………………………….
………………………………………………………….. . So basically when you shut out the civic community, Chris, you shut down democracy. And I placed the responsibility not just on the Democratic Party, but first and foremost on the mass media.
…………………………………………… the independent press is not such a hot shot either. The magazines like In These Times, Washington Monthly, Progressive Magazine, The Nation, they don’t cover civic community activities. They just pontificate. They do have some good articles, and they have their columnists, many of whom are getting very tired and repetitive. They don’t cover what Public Citizen, Common Cause, Pension Rights Center, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Union of Concerned Scientists, Veterans for Peace especially gets completely blacked out regardless of their demonstrations and non-violent civil disobedience all over the country against the military machine, the empire, the weaponization of the genocide in Gaza. They haven’t had a single article, they had to put out all kinds of great material people go to veteransforpeace.org and see for yourself.
These are veterans who’ve known wars and they can’t even get any coverage. And you can’t get any coverage of the lack of coverage. You can’t get the journalism publications to do any coverage of the censorship. So this is the ultimate censorship, the shutdown of the First Amendment. When the press, which is given a cachet in the First Amendment, there’s no other industry mentioned by name in the Constitution, are abusing their privileges for a mess of prodigies.
They’re abusing them for the profits they want to make from advertising, which of course begins to replace journalists and editors who want to do the right thing with journalists and editors who got their finger to the wind and are worried about the money before reporting the truth in an equitable fashion. It even gets worse. The Times created Trump. They kept giving him more and more publicity. They created JD Vance. Whoever heard of JD Vance? They kept writing about his book. They kept writing about his Senate race more than the opponent, Tim Ryan, and the US Senate race in Ohio………………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Ralph Nader
In a broader sense, all it comes down to are two things. Trump will self-destruct because he knows no boundaries. So his greatest enemy is Trump. And you will see the unraveling of Trump in the succeeding weeks. I would not be surprised that if he continues his bull in the China shop, illegal, wild, flailing, affecting tens of millions of people in terms of their dire necessities of life in favor of his corporate supremacist, that he will be impeached and convicted in the U.S. Senate. His own party will turn against him because when they see the polls, which are already dropping since January 20th, by the way, when they see the polls and they realize it’s either them or Trump, they will always take their own political survival.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/08/how-the-media-walked-us-into-autocracy-w-ralph-nader-the-chris-hedges-report/
Trump plans to make Ukraine a US economic colony, exploiting its critical minerals
COMMENT. The USA has played Zelensky for a sucker, all along. Now Ukraine is faced with trying to make the least worst deal to end the war. That is still better than annihilation and the very grave gamble with nuclear war.
Former US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated clearly that Washington was using Ukraine to “weaken” Russia.
Trump also revealed that the United States plans to use Ukraine’s critical minerals to create “weaponry that we’re going to use in many locations”.
GeoPolitical Economy, By Ben Norton, 2 Mar 2025
Donald Trump’s fight with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House reflected how the US treats Ukraine as a colony. Trump demands control of the country’s rare earths and critical minerals, to weaken China, re-industrialize, and build tech products. Trump wants to be paid $350 billion, roughly twice Ukraine’s GDP.
The fight that broke out in the White House between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, on February 28 was a stark symbol of the colonial relationship between the two countries.
“You’re in no position to dictate”, Trump yelled at Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards”.
The Trump administration has sought to impose an exploitative deal that will “make Ukraine a US economic colony”, in the words of the conservative British newspaper The Telegraph.
Trump is demanding control over Ukraine’s minerals, and plans to use revenue from the sale of its natural resources to pay the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, equivalent to roughly twice Ukraine’s GDP.
The US government believes that Ukraine could have trillions of dollars worth of rare earth elements and other critical minerals, which are needed for advanced technologies.
Trump wants to re-industrialize the United States, and he is offering corporations access to Ukraine’s resources to make their products.
This is part of Washington’s attempt to remove China from the supply chain for critical minerals, which has been a top priority of the Pentagon and the US House select committee on the Communist Party of China.
The Telegraph reported that Ukraine’s resources could be worth $15 trillion, writing that its “minerals offer a tantalising promise: the ability for the US to break its dependence on Chinese supplies of critical minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to iPhones and stealth fighter jets”.
Trump has stated that he wants to “un-unite” Russia and China, and his efforts to end the war in Ukraine also aim at splitting Moscow from Beijing.
Trump demands Ukraine pay the US twice its GDP
The US government pushed Ukraine into war with Russia, after expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders and backing a coup d’etat that overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral government in 2014. This set off a violent conflict that escalated into a massive proxy war between NATO and Russia in 2022.
Former US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated clearly that Washington was using Ukraine to “weaken” Russia.
At different times, Trump has falsely claimed that the United States gave Ukraine $350 billion or $500 billion in aid. This is not true.
Independent analysts have calculated that the United States spent $119.7 billion on Ukraine-related “aid” since 2022.
According to the US Department of Defense, $182.8 billion was appropriated for military operations related to Ukraine from the end of 2021 to the end of 2024. The BBC noted that this figure includes military training in Europe and US weapons supplies.
Much of this “aid” consisted of US government contracts with private, for-profit weapons corporations, which produced the arms and ammunition that were sent to Ukraine.
In other words, the US military-industrial complex made a killing off of Ukraine “aid”.
Regardless, Trump is demanding that Ukraine pay the United States at least $350 billion, which is nearly two times the size of the country’s entire economy.
Ukraine’s GDP in 2024 was reported by the IMF to be $184.1 billion — although this figure is questionable, given the war.
The US wants Ukraine’s critical minerals
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, has repeatedly said that the United States wants to exploit Ukraine’s critical minerals.
In a June 2024 interview on CBS, Graham stated:
What did Trump do to get the weapons flowing [to Ukraine during his first term]? He created a loan system.
They’re sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine. They could be the richest country in all of Europe. I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin, to share with China.
If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of. That $10 to $12 trillion of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West, not given to Putin and China. This is a very big deal, how Ukraine ends.
In an interview on Fox News, just two weeks after Trump won the presidential election in November 2024, Graham argued that “the war is about money”, and he promised that Trump would impose a deal to “enrich ourselves with rare earth minerals”:………………
It is not known if Ukraine actually has these large reserves of rare earths. This claim has been called into question.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration believes there could be trillions of dollars worth of untapped minerals, and it wants to carry out exploration operations.
In the disastrous White House press conference with Zelensky on February 28, Trump was asked if his plan would provide security for Ukraine, and he replied: “We have security in a different form. We’ll have workers there, digging, digging, digging, taking the raw earth [sic], so that we can create a lot of great product in this country”.
Trump also revealed that the United States plans to use Ukraine’s critical minerals to create “weaponry that we’re going to use in many locations”.
“This is an incredible agreement for Ukraine, because we have a big investment in their country now”, he said in the meeting with Zelensky. “And what they have, very few people have. And we’re able to really go forward with very, very high-tech things, and many other things, including weaponry — weaponry that we’re going to use in many locations, but that we need for our country”.
Throughout the press conference, Trump repeatedly referred to rare earth elements as “raw earth”.
A journalist asked Trump how exactly Ukraine will benefit from his one-sided deal. Trump responded by enthusiastically explaining how it will help the United States. The following is a partial transcript:
REPORTER: How does this provide long-term security for Ukraine?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, we don’t know exactly how much, because we’re going to be putting some money in a fund, that we’re going to get from the raw earth, that we’re going to be taking, and sharing, in terms of revenue. So it’s going to be a lot of money will be made from the sale, and from the use of raw earth……………………………………………….
Trump’s remarks criticizing US environmentalists over their opposition to the mining of rare earths was an implicit acknowledgment that the process is toxic.
In a peer-reviewed article published in 2024, scientific experts warned that the “long-term, large-scale mining and utilization of rare earths has caused serious environmental pollution and constitutes a global health issue, which has raised concerns regarding the safety of human health”.
The US government has apparently made the assessment that it would be better to pollute Ukraine by exploiting rare earths there, where Americans won’t suffer from the environmental impact.
Trump boasts of arming Ukraine
Trump’s discourse on Ukraine has been utterly contradictory. He has alternated between blaming Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama for the war, while simultaneously boasting of supplying Kiev with weapons that Obama had initially refused to send.
Trump has repeatedly demanded credit for, during his first term, arming Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missile systems, which were used to fight against Russian-backed forces in the eastern Donbas region.
In a press conference at the White House on February 25, a journalist asked Trump about the minerals deal. The following is a transcript of his response:
REPORTER: What does Ukraine get in return, Mr. President?
DONALD TRUMP: Uhh, $350 billion, and lots of equipment, and military equipment, and the right to fight on, and, originally, the right to fight.
Look, Ukraine, I will say, they’re very brave, and they’re good soldiers, but without the United States, and its money, and its military equipment, this war would have been over in a very short period of time.
In fact, I was the one that gave the Javelins. You remember the famous Javelins? That was me. That wasn’t Obama; it wasn’t Biden; it wasn’t anybody else; it was me. And they wiped out a lot of tanks with those Javelins.
And the expression was that Obama gave sheets, and I gave the Javelins. That was a big deal, at the time. It wiped out — that was the beginning, when people said, “Wow, that’s something”.
Well, that was American equipment. Without American equipment, this war would have been over very quickly. And American money, too. I mean, a lot of money.
During his fight with Zelensky on February 28, the US president made similar comments.
Trump blamed the Ukraine war on Biden, whom he called “stupid”. At the same time, however, although he denied responsibility for the war, Trump could not help but brag about sending weapons to Ukraine during his first term, which exacerbated the war that was already ongoing at the time, before it massively escalated in 2022.
“We gave you military equipment, and your men are brave, but they had to use our military equipment”, Trump yelled at Zelensky. “If you didn’t have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks”.
USA will control Ukraine’s reconstruction fund
The text of the agreement that Trump has sought to impose on Ukraine has not been publicly released.
The conservative British newspaper The Telegraph obtained the early draft of the deal, which the media outlet said would “amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity”.
This draft stated that the United States would get control over Ukraine’s “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”. It is based not on Ukrainian law, but rather New York law.
The Telegraph wrote:
The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’,” said one source close to the negotiations.
It states that “for all future licences, the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals”. Washington will have sovereign immunity and acquire near total control over most of Ukraine’s commodity and resource economy. The fund “shall have the exclusive right to establish the method, selection criteria, terms, and conditions” of all future licences and projects. And so forth, in this vein. It seems to have been written by private lawyers, not the US departments of state or commerce.
This leaked draft caused international outrage, given how explicitly colonial it was.
To try to save face, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent published an op-ed in the Financial Times on February 22 explaining the Trump administration’s plans for Ukraine.
Bessent is a billionaire hedge fund manager who previously worked for the billionaire oligarch George Soros, who is ironically a bugbear of Western conservatives.
Bessent traveled to Ukraine in February to negotiate the agreement with Zelensky.
In his FT article, Bessent explained that, under the deal, the United States will oversee a joint fund with the Ukrainian government. He wrote:
The terms of our partnership propose that revenue received by the government of Ukraine from natural resources, infrastructure and other assets is allocated to a fund focused on the long-term reconstruction and development of Ukraine where the US will have economic and governance rights in those future investments.
The Treasury secretary strongly implied that US corporations will benefit from these investments, writing, “When I was in Kyiv, I met with many American companies that have been on the ground in Ukraine for years”.
Bessent stressed that the “terms of this partnership will mobilise American talent, capital, and high standards”.
In a separate, accompanying article, the Financial Times noted that, in his op-ed, Bessent had conveniently left out how much of Ukraine’s export revenue will be paid to the US.
A draft of the deal obtained by the FT stated that Ukraine’s fund will be set up “with the encumbrance (legal claim) of such revenues in favour of the United States”. The text made it clear that Washington will be given power over reconstruction projects in Ukraine.
This framework is reminiscent of the colonial arrangement that the United States imposed on Iraq, after invading the country in an illegal war of aggression in 2003 and overthrowing its government. The US central bank, the Federal Reserve, administers the money that Iraq receives from selling its crude oil.
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal stated that his country had agreed to Trump’s mineral deal, two days before Zelensky’s meeting at the White House. It is unclear if the fight changed the status of the agreement.
The other major revelation in Bessent’s FT article was that Zelensky himself had visited Trump Tower in September, just a few weeks before the presidential election. There, in Bessent’s words, “Zelenskyy proposed giving the US a stake in Ukraine’s rare earths elements and critical minerals”.
This was the biggest irony of all: Zelensky had long showed himself to be an obedient vassal of the United States, and he offered Trump some of Ukraine’s natural resources as an incentive to continue arms shipments.
Trump apparently loved the idea, but he wanted total control, not just a little. Now, Trump is demanding to be paid roughly twice the GDP of the country.
The colonial deal that the Trump administration is imposing on Ukraine recalls an infamous quote from the late US imperial strategist Henry Kissinger, who said in the context of Washington’s puppet regime in South Vietnam, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal”.
The people of Ukraine have learned this lesson the hard way. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/03/02/trump-ukraine-us-economic-colony-minerals/
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