Good News!

by Polly Mann, WAMM

Legislators Work to Lessen the Threat of Nuclear Attacks

Arms control experts and members of Congress urged President Clinton and the Pentagon to take the American nuclear arsenal off alert to allow additional time for government leaders to gauge possible nuclear strikes and determine responses. Rep. Edward J. Markey (Dem., MA) introduced legislation in August calling on the US, as well as other countries with nuclear arsenals, to negotiate verifiable methods for ensuring that all nuclear warheads had been removed. Markey said, "These weapons should not sit like cars at a drag race with revved engines waiting for the start light to turn green. We need to slow down the decision-making engine to ensure that decision-makers have time to be 100 per cent certain."

Magazine Makes a Case for a Billionaire-Free America

Steve Worth, the CEO of America Online and editor of Worth, proposed, in the June issue of his publication, a 100 per cent tax on all wealth above a billion dollars.

Corporations Asked to Narrow the Wage Gap

Shareholders at nine US corporations cast more than 500 million votes in 1999 asking that wage gaps within their companies be closed.

British Nuclear Weapons Establishment Declared Illegal

Three British women who did approximately $150,000 in damage to the system that drives Britain's Trident II nuclear submarines were tried in a local court in Greenock, Scotland. Presiding judge Sheriff Margaret Gimblett freed the women, saying, " . . . I have to conclude that the three accused were justified in their actions." Gimblett accepted the defense argument that the deployment of nuclear warheads on a first-strike basis amounted to a criminal threat, citing a 1966 World Court opinion that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is unlawful under all circumstances, except as a last-resort self-defense to avoid annihilation.

U.S. Physicians Condemn Economic Sanctions Against Iraq

The American College of Physicians and American Society of Internal Medicine recently condemned economic sanctions against Iraq as a "war against public health." They issued specific recommendations to resolve Iraq's health crisis by allowing and monitoring the delivery of food and medical supplies (including increased supplies to offset Iraq's current high morbidity) and by empowering qualified and neutral agencies to address humanitarian appeals for exemptions to the sanctions.