New Years Greetings

[Carl B. Page]

(sent to CPSR NW members and freinds from CPSR ( Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility ) 	http://www.cpsr.org) 

CONTENTS 
	GREETING 
	MICROCREDIT CHAMPION SPEAKS 1/30/98  
	FFTF 
	WEBMANAGERS WANTED 


A Greeting from the CPSR NorthWest Director, Carl Page. 

A belated Happy New Years to you all.  

1998 promises to be an important one.  As the internet becomes mainstream, cyberspace property rights are being established.  Will free speech and efficient publishing and searching continue to be available, or will the virtual equivalent of barbed wire encircle the net?   The US Government and other governments will wrestle with the environment of free speech and tax free commerce the net has created.  CPSR will be involved.  For an attempt to define principles that justify public interest involvement in electronic infastructure policy see the unfolding OneNet manifesto at http://www.cpsr.org/program/nii/onenetindex.html

I've appreciated the chance to serve those of you who have contacted me for one thing or another.   One of my new years resolutions is to try to email all of you monthly with info on CPSR and related Northwest activities. 


WEBMANAGERS WANTED 

Some of you may not know that CPSR has a powerful web server at http://www.cpsr.org.  We need to beef up the content.  We need more info on computers in the workplace (ergonomics, monitoring), employtment in the industry.    We need comments on our new spam page.  http://www.cpsr.org/program/privacy/spam.html

Anybody who is a CPSR member who has content relevant to our mission- we would love to get it up there.  WE NEED YOUR SUGGESTIONS!  Please contact me or webmaster at cpsr.org.   You can also volunteer to edit anything you notice that might be out of date.  We are using a RedHat Linux box with the Apache server so we can deal with almost anybody's web page editing style.   

We also want to use links on our server to call attention to exemplary uses of the net.  Please send me ideas.

MICROCREDIT CHAMPION SPEAKS

Dr. Muhummad Yunus, the "Barefoot Banker" and prominent economist and feminist from Bangladesh will speak at the University of Washington Business School at 6:30 PM on January 20th.  
		Location to be announced. 
		(it should be a fairly large hall).  

Sure to please Libertarians and Socialists alike, 
Dr. Yunus will describe the lessons learned from starting and adapting the MicroCredit concept to grow Grameen, the largest bank in Bangladesh, with 35,000 locations.  If there will ever be a technical solution to the problem of poverty, this is it.  
A bank system to cater to the capital needs of, be run, owned and dominated by the poorest of the poor. 

Note that volunteer opportunities for computer professionals exist with Grameen, which is extending its cellular phone net and building a pilot internet POP in rural Bangladesh, where neither electrical nor telephone service have yet been introduced.  The Grameen Bank could also use support in improving its use of it's 200 PC's, a small number for 35,000 locations.  

Much more information about MicroCredit is available at my web on the issue, http://www.findpage.com/~carlp/microcredit.htm .



FFTF 
More than 500 people filled a SEattle Center meeting room last week to meet with WA Dept of Ecology, and US DoE officials to protest the hot-standby and potential new weapons mission for the Fast Flux Test Facility.  (FFTF) 

As northwest residents we have to be alarmed by the decaying Hanford complex.  Unfortunately it's radiation isn't decaying half as fast as the cleanup dollars are.  In the last three years $100 million dollars have been diverted from the clean-up budget to keep the FFTF reactor on hot standby.  This violates the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA) in which Washington State and the Department of Energy agreed that the mission of Hanford is cleanup.  The plan is to change this research reactor into a Tritium production facility using a new and reactor technology with unusually disasterous potential failure modes.  

Two primary excuses for this corporate welfare have been floated.  First, the need to keep our entire arsenal of thermonuclear warheads working at their maximum potential yeild.  (Modest reductions in the size of the arsenal as proposed in START-2 and 3 can provide more than enough scrap Tritium to keep remaining weapons at full strength.)  

The DOE also is tugging on heartstrings by asserting that there is a medical need for the radioisotopes that could be produced by the modified FFTF.   Two leading University of Washington Radiology researchers have dubunked that idea by pointing out that forigen sources for the needed radioisotopes are reliable.  (As long as we stay freindly with Canada we won't have a shortage.)  Nor, they say, is it conceivable that treatment with Tritium will ever be used for as many as half of US cancer patients, a preposterous proportion the DOE used to emphasize the need.  

The assertion that the reactor is needed for medical purposes is merely a ruse to distract attention from the fact that the reactor program is purely a weapons program that would supply a stream of tritium for a possible resumption of thermonuclear warhead construction 

Currently the Washington State Department of Ecology has the power to reject the plan under the terms of the TPA but isn't planning to.  !!! The Dept of Ecology's public comment period has been extended to February 20th. !!! 

Check out http://www.findpage.com/~carlp/fftf.html for details and links to more information.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe scn
END