Bernie Sanders' Nuclear Waste Votes Divide Texas Activists

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Ian Sams
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Revealing @TexasTribune read on Sanders support for sending nuclear waste to a small, poor, mostly Latino Texas town http://www.texastribune.org/2016/02/28/Sanders-Nuclear-Waste-Votes-Divide-Texas-Activists/ …




The Texas Tribune
Bernie Sanders' Nuclear Waste Votes Divide Texas Activists

http://www.texastribune.org/2016/02/28/Sanders-Nuclear-Waste-Votes-Divide-Texas-Activists/

by Jamie Lovegrove Feb. 28, 2016


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Photo by Laura Buckman / David Bowser

In the late 1990s, when now-U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was a member of the House, he supported a compact between Maine, Vermont and Texas that originally proposed dumping low-level radioactive waste in a small minority community in far-West Texas, putting him at odds with other progressive congressmen.

Though the waste never made it to Sierra Blanca, a low-income, largely Hispanic town in Hudspeth County, Sanders’ efforts have attracted renewed attention online in the leadup to Tuesday's Texas primary. Critics suggest that the candidate’s role in promoting the compact — which ultimately brought the waste to a different site in West Texas — undermines his otherwise progressive record.

“It reflects very poorly on him,” said longtime environmental justice activist Dr. Robert Bullard, dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University and the author of Dumping on Dixie. “Shoving this down people’s throats is not progressive politics. It was business as usual. It’s a classic case of rich people from a white state shifting something they don’t want to a poor minority community somewhere else.”

But other activists in the area have forgiven Sanders for his role in the proposal. Bill Addington lives in Sierra Blanca and was a leading activist against the nuclear waste compact, creating a legal defense fund and even travelling to Vermont to directly protest Sanders. But now Addington says he is supporting Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary.

“Bernie made a big mistake, but this country has a lot bigger problems than what happened 20 years ago,” Addington said. “Not that that gives him a free pass, not that it makes him right, but we’ve moved on.”.........................

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. This is another of his questionable votes.

It may have made sense for Vermont to send nuclear waste off to Texas. That kind of decision was bad for the country as a whole, and horrendous for Texas.

[Nye Bevan]

2. Like on gun control, I guess he was "serving his constituents" (nt)