The incinerators are coming, and the first city incinerator built in Illinois since 1970 will soon be going up in southwest suburban Crestwood. It will burn 450 tons of trash per day and will generate electricity, according to Solid Waste Management Newsletter (December 1987). SWMN’s January issue adds the story of how Philadelphia recently tried to send dioxin-contaminated incinerator ash to Panama for building a roadbed. No dice, said the Central Americans, even before our EPA revealed that the ash contained 5 to 25 times the “acceptable” levels of dioxin. So “Philadelphia then contracted to send some of it to landfills in Ohio and West Virginia.” How sweet–our very own third world.
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Ask Jerome Stermer how things am going and you’re likely to get two answers. The organization of which he’s president–Voices for Illinois Children–is doing fine; the children it seeks to help are not. For instance, he writes in VIC’s newsletter Voices (Fall 1987), everyone agrees that good preschool education has “a long-term positive effect on increasing graduation and employment rates for high school seniors, and on reducing crime, delinquency, and welfare assistance.” State support for preschool was a key part of the 1985 educational reforms. “However, the current level of funding is barely enough to reach seven percent of children identified at risk of educational failure.”
What good is a tiger of a First Amendment if those using it are all pussycats? “Think of it,” Miami Herald foreign editor Mark Seibel tells Mother Jones (February/March 1988). “The U.S. government is conducting a war of questionable legality in Central America. It’s the major foreign policy initiative of this entire administration, and editors are somehow not interested. I think they . . . have allowed themselves to be cowed into believing that they are somehow doing something wrong when they expose government wrongdoing.”
