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Continued from the Front Page ---

WHERE OCCUPY & NO NUKES MERGE---AND WIN!!

Injuries have been present but minimal. There's been at least one murder, that of the anti-nuclear activist Karen Silkwood. But overall, given the magnitude of the movement over more than 40 years of confrontation, individual casualties have been slight.

And the accomplishments have been historic. Whereas Richard Nixon once promised 1000 US reactors by the year 2000, there are now 104. These dangerous relics are now under attack, especially at Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, New York.

Worldwide we have seen Germany renounce atomic energy and commit to renewables. Siemens, once a corporate nuclear flagship, has turned instead toward Solartopian technologies. Like Japan, now horribly contaminated by Fukushima, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and others are following suit.

But the final fight remains to be won. While pouring billions into cornering the global solar market, China is still poised to build some 30 reactors. India, Britain, Korea and a few others are also toying with more. But especially in the wake of Fukushima, they are not a done deal.

In the United States, the key is to deny the nuclear industry the federal funding without which it can't build new reactors.

And here is where the Occupy and No Nukes movements intersect. Wall Street has actually retreated, and will not finance new commercial reactors.

So the industry has gone straight to the White House and Congress to force taxpayers to underwrite new construction loans. In the past decade reactor backers have spent more than $60 million per year lobbying Congress and the White House to get this money.

With no such budget, the national No Nukes movement has been defeating these give-aways.

Now comes the turning point. In 2011, for the first time, solar and wind are being recognized by mainstream economists as cheaper than new nukes. And renewables overall in the United States generate more usable power than operating reactors.

If we can hold off these loan guarantees for another year or two, and shut some older reactors like Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, the dam will break, and the corporate impetus to build new reactors may finally go away.

Atomic energy is, after all, a means of centralizing power in corporate hands. But there is only so far the one-percenters can ride a dead horse, especially if it's radioactive.

Our struggle then comes with fighting to keep the Solartopian conversion in the people's hands. We will love defeating fossil and nuclear fuels. But we want to guarantee our energy supply---even if it's driven by the wind and sun---is controlled by the community, not the corporations.

And here is where Occupy/No Nukes can jump the power of democracy to a whole new level.

Human society is on the brink of its most significant technological conversion ever. Green power will be a multi-trillion-dollar industry, outstripping even computers and the internet.

But who will own the sun? Will the corporations again monopolize a nascent revolution?

Or can the Occupy and No Nukes movements keep this technology decentralized, with the power Mother Earth gives us resting in the hands of the people?

In this struggle, longevity is the key. The grassroots No Nukes campaign is some four decades young and going strong. Every few years the corporate media runs features about how it has died and gone away, and they have always been wrong. We will not disappear until the nukes do.

The same must be the case for Occupy. Any day now the Foxists will proclaim the movement dead and failed. It will be nonsense. But in the long term, it's up to us to prove them wrong. All the bright futures above come true only if we stay with it as long as it takes.

At the intersection of No Nukes & Occupy, we know that true democracy can only come when our energy supply is owned by the people. A grassroots-based energy supply is at the core of a sustainable Solartopian future.

In the 1970s a grassroots movement led by the Clamshell Alliance nonviolently occupied a reactor site at Seabrook, New Hampshire, and sparked a global green powered revolution whose completion may be in sight.

This year the Occupy movement took to Wall Street, and has exploded into a global democratic revolution with unbound potential.

There are innumerable hurdles along the way.

But as these two movements flow together like a mighty stream, let them wash away forever the corporate plague of atomic energy, and free at last the path to a democratized, green-powered Earth.

Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.harveywasserman.com along with HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. His SOLARTOPIA GREEN POWER HOUR is podcast from www.talktainmentradio.com.