Interview by Joan Brunwasser
My guest today is Harvey Wasserman, co-author of "Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?" Welcome back to OpEdNews, Harvey. We spoke about your new book at the beginning of September. But election-related stories seem to be breaking all the time. Can you bring us up to speed? Are we worse off than we were in 2000, 2004 or 2008?

Well, it's the best of times, it's the worst of times.

On the one hand, much of the media and even the Democratic Party has picked up on the nation-wide Jim Crow campaign being waged by the Republicans to disenfranchise as many suspected Democrats as possible. According to the Brennan Center at NYU, this could mean ten million or more Americans will lose their vote.

Back when we first started writing about such things, we were attacked by the Democrats and even much of the left media. Now it's being taken seriously. Even the New York Times has covered some of it. And many of the laws enabling this mass disenfranchisement have been overturned by the courts.

As Election Day 2012 approaches, I find myself haunted by memories of Election Day 2004, November 2. At that time I was volunteering with George Soros’ organization, America Coming Together. I was working with a lot of people from outside Ohio. There was a woman from California, others from the eastern seaboard and even a man who had been living in France for a number of years had come to help turn the tide of the election in Columbus in the bellwether State of Ohio. Early in the evening, about a half-hour before the polls closed, three of us were driving up and down Cleveland Avenue in the Linden area of Columbus, to see what was really happening or on some unremembered errand. It was raining, cold, and the dark streets glistened bleakly in the rain. Our hopes were at first buoyed and then quickly erased as the radio reported first a hopeful indication of a Kerry victory based on exit polls and then, in less than a half an hour, a Kerry defeat was abruptly announced based on the “actual” results.

“I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan.”

I listen to these words with fresh awe, 40 years later. They pierce the soul. Once upon a time, presidential politics was this open, this responsive to moral concerns. The speaker, of course, was George McGovern. The words, delivered during the Democratic National Convention in 1972 — and the campaign that followed — represent the political high-water mark of the social change movements of the 1960s.

“And as one whose heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day.”

George McGovern’s death this week at age 90 is a stunning wakeup call — in the middle of an intolerably narrow, superficial presidential campaign, in which such compelling issues as war, peace and climate change are off the table, “the lesser of two evils” is the best choice voters have and almost everyone accepts this choice as the best democracy has to offer. It’s been 40 years since progressives have stood at the threshold of national political change.

The US fleet of 104 deteriorating atomic reactors is starting to fall. The much-hyped "nuclear renaissance" is now definitively headed in reverse.

The announcement that Wisconsin's Kewaunee will shut next year will be remembered as a critical dam break. Opened in 1974, Kewaunee has fallen victim to low gas prices, declining performance, unsolved technical problems and escalating public resistance.

Many old US reactors are still profitable only because their capital costs were forced down the public throat during deregulation, through other manipulations of the public treasury, and because lax regulation lets them operate cheaply while threatening the public health.

But even that's no longer enough. Dominion Energy wanted a whole fleet of reactors, then backed down and couldn't even find a buyer for Kewaunee. As the company put it: "the decision" to shut Kewaunee "was based purely on economics. Dominion was not able to move forward with our plan to grow our nuclear fleet in the Midwest to take advantage of economies of scale". Ironically, Kewaunee was recently given a license extension by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.