India and South Korea have increased oil imports from Iran despite the United States’ plea for the two countries to reduce their dependence on the Iranian crude, says the International Energy Agency (IEA).
According to an IEA report, released on Wednesday, both Seoul and New Delhi sharply raised their oil purchases from Iran in January.
The rise in the purchase of the Iranian crude comes despite Washington’s appeals for a reduction of oil imports from Iran by around 15 percent in volume.
The White House is now concerned that it may have to impose sanctions on New Delhi for its refusal to cut back on crude purchases from Tehran.
Earlier on Tuesday, Turkey’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Taner Yildiz announced that Turkey is continuing to purchase crude oil from the Islamic Republic.
Oil prices have remained high following Iran’s decision to cut oil sales to some European countries in response to the EU’s sanctions on the country.
On January 23, EU foreign ministers approved sanctions against Iran, including a ban on Iranian oil imports, a freeze on the assets of the Central Bank of Iran within the bloc’s states and a ban on selling diamonds, gold, and other precious metals to Tehran.
The US, Israel and some of their allies accuse Tehran of pursuing military objectives in its nuclear energy program.
Iran has repeatedly refuted the Western allegations regarding its nuclear energy program, arguing that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, it is entitled to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
March 15, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Wars for Israel | International Energy Agency, Iran, Sanctions against Iran |
1 Comment
An Inside Glimpse Into the Nefarious Operations of Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith’s very public resignation, replete with a pointed letter published in the New York Times yesterday, has landed upon the investment bank like a bomb. Slamming a “toxic and destructive environment” within Goldman Sachs, Smith says the firm’s internal culture has devolved to the point where the entire staff not only tolerates, but expects workers at all levels, from senior partners to associates, to pursue nothing but ever-more sophisticated means of “ripping their clients off.”
Apologists for the financial sector —including the editors of the major business newspapers and television networks— predictably have shot back with a flurry columns and reports, mostly designed to discredit the former vice president by making fun of Smith and his concerns. If you strip away the ad hominem layers to these responses though, the core problems raised by Smith remain, and the reaction of the business press seems all the more absurd, for Goldman’s pesky turncoat isn’t saying anything that’s news to the public: Goldman Sachs is characterized by a toxic culture of greed? Stop the presses!
There is much more to be said about Goldman Sachs’ derivatives operation, however, and Smith’s provocative resignation provides an opportunity because he was working in the belly of it.
At the center of Smith’s critique are derivatives, the arcane financial instruments that transformed the world’s splintered national economies and regional banking systems into a single, if complicated, global system. Evangelists of derivatives claim they have made new heights of economic growth, trade, and prosperity possible. Critics have pointed out since the beginning of the derivatives boom in the 1980s how perfectly suited they are to fraud and systemic catastrophe via the greed of the few and the powerful.
Derivatives, many close observers have reminded us, were at the center the Enron meltdown, the demise of Long Term Capital Management, the Asian Financial Crisis, and most recently the Great Recession and its various flares, from the housing bubble that exploded from junked collateralized debt obligations, to the current Greek debt imbroglio and the credit default swaps haunting the background. In each case, and many less-known fiascos, derivatives traders in Wall Street’s leading banks played key roles either as the major villains, or enabling partners in vast crimes of information, leverage, and risk. Time and again we find derivatives at the center of scandalous greed. Now we have a high-profile banker denouncing not just some bad apples in his firm, but the firm’s entire culture.
There’s a deeper and more disturbing truth still further below the surface though. To get there it’s instructive to know a little more about Goldman’s derivatives operation, and the wider industry of which Goldman is a small part.
Who are the clients on the receiving end of Goldman’s “toxic and destructive” tendencies? Many times the victims have been other corporations, industrial firms with less sophisticated and perhaps naive financial officers. Quite often though the victims of Goldman’s derivatives operation have been cities, counties, and local government agencies. A key client category for derivatives has been large local governments and agencies that issue hefty sums of long-term debt.
Goldman, and the handful of other global banks that dominate the derivatives industry, sold local governments on the idea that a particular set of derivative products could provide wondrous solutions to hedge against the risks inherent in issuing long term debt. The banks claimed that interest rate swaps could shield counties, cities, and agencies from possible spikes in floating interest rates attached to their bonds. Thus many governments agreed to complex, multi-decade deals involving the swapping of payments on fictive amounts of money associated with real debt. In no time at all interest rate swaps became the single largest category of derivatives, dwarfing all others.
Today interest rate swaps make up 82% of the total market in derivatives, measured by total notional amounts. This is partly the result of governments all over the world entering into interest rate swaps, agreeing to tie cash flows to trillions of notional dollars. What’s key is that none of this has required duplicity or reckless greed on the part of bankers at Goldman Sachs or other firms. Let’s be clear; this is a structural transformation of capitalism on a global scale, and it has sucked up all corporate and government entities into the new logic of hedging and efficiency. That a few powerful financial corporations have placed themselves in strategic positions to benefit from this structural shift should come as no surprise.
In California’s Bay Area, multiple governments have come to find themselves on the paying end of Goldman’s derivatives department where apparently traders referred to clients as “muppets.” The most obvious example is the city of Oakland where a chronic budget crisis has led to the shuttering of schools and cuts to elder services, housing, and public safety. Oakland signed an interest rate swap with Goldman in 1997. The terms of the deal, revised once in 2003, were typical of interest rate swaps except that Oakland’s financial officers, based on this author’s research and impressions, seem to have agreed to a somewhat higher fixed rate obligation than most other cities that signed swap deals for similar amounts of debt with comparable ratings. Oakland partly did this, I am guessing, to receive upfront payments of roughly $5 and $10 million from Goldman Sachs, cash that the city wished to have on hand immediately. The bank seemed eager to do this because the original terms, and renegotiated terms in 2003, were much to its favor. It would earn the $15 million back, and then some over the twenty-four year life of the swap.
Across the Bay, Goldman Sachs signed an interest rate swap agreement with the San Francisco International Airport in 2007 to hedge $143 million in debt. Today this agreement has a negative value to the Airpot of about $22 million, even though its terms were much better than those Oakland agreed to. The Airport, like Oakland, must now pay millions each year to Goldman Sachs until the agreement expires, or until the floating LIBOR interest rate rises enough to offset the net balance of payments. Goldman sold derivatives up and down California and across the United States to cities, counties, and agencies, promising them a means of reducing debt payments over the long haul.
Business press pundits who are now slamming Smith say it’s absurd to expect that Goldman Sachs was doing anything less than trying to make money off these deals, and that counter-parties to the firm’s dealings knew well what they were signing up for. This mischaracterizes the entire problem, however, and threatens to steer the conversation into a narrow, and politically irrelevant one about whether Goldman Sachs is or isn’t a den of fraud.
When governments signed up for interest rate swap deals with Goldman Sachs they certainly did know that the bank would be making money off the agreement, first in the form of up-front fees, and then off of savings produced by the pairing of comparative advantages in debt markets that interest rate swaps are designed to achieve. If you don’t understand that last point, don’t worry. What it means simply is that Goldman Sachs sold interest rate swap products to governments by promising to both protect a government against interest rate volatility, and to also likely reduce the overall long-term cost of borrowing money. It was supposed to be a win-win game.
The truly impressive thing about the whole derivatives market is that it is supposed to ratchet up the efficiency of the entire global economy, making dollars go much further, protecting all parties from volatility, transcending previous market barriers and smoothing flows of cash… at least in theory. The theory seemed to be working in the 1990s and through most of the 2000s. Goldman didn’t have to convince anyone of this for the results were plain to see.
That it hasn’t panned out in practice, that the whole derivatives-based economy nearly collapsed in 2008 and continues to falter, isn’t so much the result of Goldman’s toxic culture of greed as it is the outcome of a much more troubling feature of our economic system. While I agree with Smith’s observation —which is important because it’s based on insider knowledge— that Goldman Sachs is an especially predatory corporation, I see a larger pattern of power relations embodied in the new economy, structured as it is by derivatives, that isn’t based on any specific firm’s internal culture or corruption, or the supposed naivety and stupidity of financial officers in government and less profitable sectors of the economy.
Consider the fact that Goldman Sachs isn’t even the biggest fish in the pond, nor is it profiting the most from the blizzard of derivative products that structure the capitalist economy today. Of the five financial corporations that “dominate in derivatives,” as the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency puts it, Goldman Sachs ranks fourth, behind by Bank of America, Citibank, and far behind the absolute king of derivatives, JP Morgan Chase.
In February JP Morgan Chase let slip that it cleared $1.4 billion in revenue on trading interest rate swaps in 2011, making these instruments one of the bank’s biggest sources of profit. According to some reports, JP Morgan Chase made billions more in 2008 and 2009 when the financial crisis and federal response combined to make floating-to-fixed interest rate swaps into extremely profitable assets for the banks on the floating side of the deal. Similar things can be said for Mogan Stanley, HSBC, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Bank of New York, and the dozens of smaller interest rate swap peddlers currently profiting from direct transfers of public dollars.
Are all these banks poisoned by toxic cultures of greed? Surely there are similarities in the internal cultures of large banks, and greed and a little sociopathic ability to profit from another’s loss is a professional asset in these sorts of organizations. In contemporary corporate culture the euphemism for this is “competition.”
Toxic culture and greed, or “competitiveness” if you prefer, in the investment banks isn’t a sufficient answer to why derivatives have become the foundation of today’s global economy, however. The criminal activities of some bankers, driven by these more pervasive cultures, can’t explain the economic crisis and the vast injustices that are being perpetrated still in the name of “economic recovery.” The interest rate swap crisis stinging local governments and enriching the banks is a case in point.
The windfall of revenue accruing to JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and their peers from interest rate swap derivatives is due to nothing other than political decisions that have been made at the federal level to allow these deals to run their course, even while benchmark interest rates, influenced by the Federal Reserve’s rate setting, and determined by many of these same banks (the London Interbank Offered Rate, LIBOR) linger close to zero. These political decisions have determined that virtually all interest rate swaps between local and state governments and the largest banks have turned into perverse contracts whereby cities, counties, school districts, water agencies, airports, transit authorities, and hospitals pay millions yearly to the few elite banks that run the global financial system, for nothing meaningful in return. These perfectly legal cash flows measuring globally in the hundreds of billions, from the public to the banks, dwarf anything that is the result of fraud.
Back when the economy was in a “normal” stasis of growth, the early and mid-2000s, interest rate swaps and other derivatives promised security against risk, and a new vista for capitalism and public finance. Tellingly, when the crisis struck, swaps were allowed to become a one way flow of funds from the public to the banks. This shadow bailout for the banks has done considerable damage to already cash-strapped local governments suffering from declines in tax revenues and federal aid.
Whether Goldman Sachs is or isn’t an organization gripped by a toxic culture isn’t all that important when one considers the destructive impact that derivatives have had, and continue to have upon society. Capitalism as it functions today is completely dependent upon derivatives. Interest rate swaps are the single largest type of derivative, measured by notional amount, because they achieve an integration of different national, regional, and sectoral financial markets into one global financial system. It’s in the genetics of the project of financial globalization, fueled by derivatives, that the real problem lies, not in the internal culture of Goldman Sachs, or the illegal behaviors of some bankers across many firms. The real crime lies in perfectly legal and legitimated activities whereby a few powerful corporations design a system that puts the welfare of the world’s vast majority at grave risk. It’s the system that’s toxic. Goldman Sachs merely operates well within the toxicity.
Nevertheless, Greg Smith’s effort to pull back the curtain on one of the most nefarious and powerful corporations in history is most welcomed, especially for the deeper conversations it can stoke about the origins of the current crisis.
Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist and author who lives and works in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.
March 15, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Economics | Goldman Sachs, Greg Smith, Long Term Capital Management, Wall Street |
Leave a comment
Recent civilian airstrike victims in Gaza. Photo by Mohammed Al Majdalawy
Seven year-old, Baraka Al Mughrabi, died, on Wednesday midday, after succumbing to wounds he sustained during an Israeli air raid targeting Gaza City on Monday. His death brings the death toll due to Israeli military escalations targeting the coastal enclave since last Friday to 26.
The latest round of escalation started after the Israeli army assassinated, on Friday, the leader of the armed Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza and his assistant. Palestinian sources announced today that among those 26 killed were five elderly men, two women and five children. 80 people in total were injured some lie in critical conditions.
Meanwhile on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning Israeli jet fighters violated the Egyptian mediated truce and conducted air raids targeting a number of locations in Gaza city. One of the targeted buildings was a wood factory. The factory was totally destroyed, no injuries reported.
Cairo announced on Tuesday that a ceasefire deal was reached between Israel and Palestinian groups in Gaza ending five days of escalation in the coastal enclave. According to Cairo Israel will stop attacks and extra judicial assassinations while Palestinian resistance will halt home-made shell fire from Gaza.
Meanwhile Israeli army officials dubbed the Egyptian mediated truce “fragile” adding that Palestinian groups may violate the truce deal. Yesterday Palestinian groups announced that they will resume firing home-made Qassam shells into Israeli towns near Gaza if Israel does not keep its end of the deal.
March 15, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, War Crimes | Gaza, Gaza City, Gaza Strip, Israel |
5 Comments
In ancient Greece and Rome the front line soldiers were drawn from the wealthiest class of citizens. That was partly because each soldier had to provide his own equipment and armor was expensive, but it was also due to the belief that men who had the most to lose would fight best. It also guaranteed that wars would be no more frequent than necessary, would be short in duration, and would be decisive in nature. America’s Founding Fathers clearly had similar ideas, envisioning only a small national army and much larger state militias where the local property owners would come out on weekends and drill with their weapons on the village green, developing the skills necessary to defend their homes.
I was thinking about the duties entailed in citizenship as I watched television coverage of the spectacle of the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). I wondered about the six thousand plus attendees at the conference and their hubristic sense of entitlement minus any sense of responsibility for what they advocate. The entire conference was dedicated to going to war with Iran, a war that is manifestly not in America’s interest. But there they were, welcoming more than half of Congress and a majority of Supreme Court Justices as well as the President of the United States, as they called for war on behalf of a foreign country.
I asked myself how many of those at AIPAC would pay any price at all for going to war with Iran? How many of them have children in the military? With a little searching I could only find ten members out of the 535 members of Congress having recently had sons or daughters in the military and I would imagine the numbers among other AIPAC attendees would be even lower. I would bet the percentage is miniscule. And how many of those at AIPAC will be contributing their wealth to support another absolutely senseless foreign war? None, most likely as America has become addicted to going to war on a credit card. Instead, the AIPAC attendees have learned that it is possible to start wars by using much smaller sums of money to buy influence and votes on Capitol Hill and compliant editorial writers in the media, meaning that AIPAC’s $65 million budget can easily translate into a war that costs the American taxpayer several trillion dollars, as occurred with Iraq.
AIPAC understands that there is no need to sacrifice one’s children or spend anything more than necessary when there are other people’s children out there who are ready, willing and able to die for your cause and for the foreign land that you hold most dear. It is a coward’s way to go to war without pain, without grief, and without cost to you personally, where fighting and dying by others is little more than an abstraction. It is one more powerful reason why groups like AIPAC, instead of being celebrated, should be placed under Justice Department supervision and strictly monitored as collaborative and subversive agents of foreign powers, which is precisely what they are. And when they step out of line by stealing secrets or suborning politicians it should mean hard time in prison. No one deserves to die in someone else’s fight, particularly in a bad cause, and no one should be able to start a war and escape the consequences.
Philip Giraldi is the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
March 15, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Wars for Israel | AIPAC, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Congress, Council for the National Interest, Iran, Philip Giraldi |
Leave a comment
The results of a new poll show US President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have plunged to 41 percent despite improving jobs data.
The last Monday survey, carried out by The New York Times newspaper and CBS News TV channel, show Obama’s approval rating has hit 41 percent, down nine percent from the 50 percent threshold, which an incumbent president generally needs to win a reelection, AFP reported.
With 47 percent of respondents disapproving of Obama’s overall performance, the poll results have cast doubt on his prospects for the upcoming November presidential election.
An earlier poll conducted by The Washington Post newspaper in conjunction with ABC news network also registered a drop in Obama’s approval rating, though the decrease was not quite so severe.
Only 46 percent of the surveyed individuals approved of Obama’s handling of his presidential duties and 50 percent disapproved due to rising gas prices.
The situation, the AFP report said, was a reversal from early February when 50 percent approved of the president’s performance and 46 percent disapproved.
Two-thirds of the respondents said they disapproved of the way Obama was handling rising pump prices which now average nearly four dollars a gallon (3.8 liters).
Meanwhile, another poll conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, whose results were published on Tuesday, indicated that three out of four Americans are opposed to an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities by the Israeli regime.
Moreover, 69 percent of American respondents stated that the US should pursue the policy of negotiations with Iran, with a large majority, adding that such talks should primarily take place through the United Nations Security Council.
According to the poll, the opposition of the Americans to a military strike against Iran was expressed by 79 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of independents.
March 15, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Obama, United States presidential approval rating |
5 Comments
The International diamond-regulatory system, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, set up to end the trade in blood diamonds is under pressure to ban diamonds from Israel because human rights activists state they are funding the Israeli military, which stands accused of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity by the UN Human Rights Council.
A statement issued by a coalition of human rights groups including Jews for “Boycotting Israel Goods,” the Alternative Information Centre – a Bethlehem-based Israeli/Palestinian group – and a number of Palestine solidarity groups from Ireland and Britain calls on the new KPSC chair, US Ambassador, Gillian Milovanovic and members of the KPSC to ban the export of diamonds crafted in the Zionist entity.
The groups expressed “great concern about the recent escalation of military attacks by Israeli forces against the defenseless, besieged residents of the Gaza strip which have killed at least 23 Palestinians, including two children.”
“Scores of people have been injured, while thousands more have been terrorized and traumatized. With this horrific backdrop, we believe the time for action is now. The jewellery industry is facilitating Israeli war crimes by allowing the trade in diamonds from Israel which generates around $1 billion per annum in funding for the Israeli military [1]. The international community must act in a meaningful manner to end Israeli violations of international law; banning the export of Israeli diamonds would be a very important step in that direction,” the Kimberley’s statement read.
The statement calls on jewelers “not to sell diamonds from Israel which should be regarded as blood diamonds and to end the false and grossly misleading practice of claiming that diamonds which fund gross human rights violations by government forces are ‘conflict free’.”
It also called for support for this initiative from other organizations: “We ask human rights groups worldwide to pressure the diamond industry to isolate diamonds processed in Israel and not to allow the legitimate diamond market to be used as an economic shield to fund Israeli apartheid, occupation and war crimes,” the statement concluded.
March 15, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Blood diamond, Gaza, Kimberley Process Certification Scheme |
1 Comment
Back in 2010, Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers (AFT), lashed out at President Obama who she said was part of the “blame the teacher crowd” of education reform.
“I never thought I’d see a Democratic president, whom we helped elect, and his education secretary applaud the mass firing of 89 teachers and staff,” she said – referring to the firing of all teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island earlier that year.
Last month, the AFT executive council unanimously voted to endorse Obama for reelection.
“While we have not agreed with every decision President Obama has made, he shares our deep commitment to rebuilding the middle class and ensuring everyone has an opportunity to achieve the American dream,” Weingarten said. Never mind those 89 teachers or the thousands more whose “opportunity to achieve the American dream” is under the gun of Obama’s school “reform” agenda.
Last year, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka criticized Obama for aligning with the right and cutting social programs.
“If they [Obama administration] don’t have a jobs program, I think we’d better use our money doing other things,” the leader of the nation’s largest union federation said, threatening to withhold labor’s support for Obama. Less than two months later, Trumka told reporters that the AFL-CIO would most likely endorse the reelection campaign, saying, “President Obama has been a friend for us.”
On Tuesday the AFL-CIO’s executive board unanimously voted to endorse Obama.
“Although the labor movement has sometimes differed with the president and often pushed his administration to do more – and do it faster – we have never doubted his commitment to a strong future for working families,” Trumka said in a statement announcing the endorsement.
None of this should surprise anyone who is familiar with labor’s captivity in the machinery of the Democratic Party. What appears to be schizophrenic in the real world is normal behavior in the world of organized labor and electoral politics.
But this election comes after a year of unprecedented attacks on workers.
Both Republicans and Democrats have been ratcheting up the war against unions, a fact that is making it increasingly difficult for union leaders to justify their support for Obama to their rank-and-file members.
“Notwithstanding all our disappointment with the Obama presidency, it’s clear that the clowns on the Republican side would be devastating to working people,” a Communication Workers of America (CWA) official told In These Times last month. “But we’re anticipating a tougher challenge motivating people because there is a lot of disappointment and letdown,” he admitted.
That’s probably because workers are hard-pressed to imagine what could be more “devastating to working people” than what they’ve seen in the last year alone. Workers have faced the erosion of collective bargaining rights, the first state in the Midwest passing “Right to Work” legislation, an FAA reauthorization bill signed by Obama that makes it more difficult for airline workers to organize, plans for massive layoffs of postal workers nationwide, and ramped-up attacks on public education.
And that’s by no means an exhaustive list of the recent blows suffered by the labor movement.
In addition to the AFT and AFL-CIO, major unions that have declared their endorsement for Obama’s reelection include SEIU, AFSCME, Laborers’ International Union (LIUNA), United Food and Commercial Workers, CWA, the Machinists, United Farm Workers, United Steel Workers, and the National Education Association. The list is sure to grow as the election season moves forward.
“We’ve been treading water as a labor movement,” says Chris Townsend, Political Action Director of United Electrical Workers (UE). “At best, supporting Democrats is a strategy to buy time. And union leaders won’t admit to their members that they are stuck,” he adds, echoing a point he made in a recent interview on Al-Jazeera’s Inside Story.
Townsend is one of the few union officials in the labor movement who forcefully criticizes labor’s allegiance to the Democratic Party. He points out that the more unions continue the bankrupt strategy of supporting a party that is often ambivalent or hostile to the movement, the harder it will be for them to beat back the right-wing agenda to destroy unions altogether.
How many more times is labor going to go back to the members and tell them to vote for some Democrat that has left us hanging? It’s no wonder that many union members and workers are not buying the Obama-Biden rhetoric this time. Instead of tackling the corporations and the Republicans head-on, the White House stands by in silence while organized labor is subjected to a life and death struggle in Wisconsin and Ohio. If union members get stuck voting for Obama because Romney is so much worse, we should just tell the truth. We are trapped in a profoundly corrupt and rigged political system. By going back again and again and hanging the union seal of approval on candidates who are not supportive of our cause, we merely hasten our own demise.
On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported that labor leaders are talking about “shifting” their tactics by spending less on politics and more on movement-building. The Times reports that the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents some 190,000 transit workers in the U.S. and Canada, “has shifted ‘the culture of [the] union from…political activity to broader coalition building,’”
Meanwhile, an election battle is brewing within AFSCME, a union that represents 1.6 million public sector workers and which spent more money during the 2010 elections than any other group. One of the candidates vying to replace the outgoing President Gerald McEntee says he wants to put an end to the “checkbook unionism” that has so closely tied the union to the Democratic Party.
But the political landscape since the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision has seen unlimited spending on politics in the form of “Super PACs.” And it’s not just corporations that are taking advantage of the new terrain. At the end of January the ALF-CIO’s “Workers’ Voice” Super PAC had raised up to $4 million.
Of course, union leaders will not be able to mobilize their membership the way they did in 2008. Four years ago, the AFL-CIO sent 250,000 volunteers knocking on doors for Obama and other Democratic candidates. Much of that base of members and allies is deeply disenchanted with the Obama administration. And for good reason.
Before he dropped labor’s biggest priority in 2009 by abandoning the Employee Free Choice Act, Obama was busy stacking his administration with Wall Street insiders. More recent corporate additions include the anti-union General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt who chairs the president’s “Jobs Council.”
Over the past few years teachers from California to Chicago to New York have essentially been held at gunpoint by austerity-driven governors and mayors whose cuts and test-based reforms are supported by Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan.
In the private sector, American Airlines is using Chapter 11 bankruptcy to tear up union contracts, “restructure” pensions and cut up to 13,000 jobs. And for his reelection, Obama has received nearly $29,000 from AT&T, a company that is looking to layoff hundreds of workers in the Southeast.
Last year, Democrats in Indiana fled the state and successfully stopped a bill that would have made Indiana the first “Right to Work” state in the union-heavy rust belt. But this year, the Democrats chose to stand down, giving the green light to employers to bleed members and money from the unions.
But it seems Democrats can rely on Obama’s celebrity and eloquence to win back the hearts of labor leaders. Introducing Obama at the recent United Auto Workers conference, UAW leader Bob King praised Obama as “the champion of all workers.” Yes, the champion of all workers.
If King feels he owes Obama a bit of gratitude, it’s because the president extracted huge concessions from his members in exchange for “saving the industry.” So King’s job is safe, even if hundreds of thousands of workers suffered massive layoffs and cuts to wages and benefits. Years of outsourcing, two-tier wage structures and other concessions have led to job loss and stagnant wages throughout the industry. Now the UAW has joined Obama in celebrating the return of some outsourced jobs thanks to these “competitive wages.”
In an apparent mission to turn the U.S. into a source of cheap labor, policymakers in both political parties have for decades demonstrated their commitment to permanently lower working-class living standards. And recently Obama has been less shy about his role in this effort, touting his own policies for helping to make the U.S. more competitive with low-wage countries. Indeed, the cover story in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine, documenting journalist Mac McClelland’s time working in an online retail warehouse, leaves readers wondering how far the U.S. working class is from experiencing the same grueling conditions that have made Apple factories in China so famous.
Manufacturing isn’t the only target, though. The logic of Obama’s “Race to the Top” (RTTT) program – offering education funding to states in exchange for teacher evaluations based on student test scores and opening more charters – has permeated school districts across the country, with devastating effects for students, teachers and their unions. In many cities, as “underperforming” teachers are fired and “underperforming” schools face closures and “turnarounds,” low-income students of color are being impacted the most.
But even if RTTT is aimed at privatizing public education and undermining teacher unionism, AFT President Weingarten is more likely to be heard giving her qualified praise for the program. That’s not the only reason AFT’s exuberant endorsement of Obama is unsurprising. After all, in addition to running the second-largest education union in the country, Weingarten is an active member of the Democratic National Committee. The fact is that countless other paid Democratic Party functionaries cycle through the upper echelons of the labor movement. But they are a lot less powerful than the corporate forces in the party, which begs the question: who is working for whom?
No wonder, then, that labor has at times had trouble relating to the Occupy movement. Reasonable concerns about cooptation aside, the movement includes ultra-left elements who claim to represent the “89 percent” – that is, excluding what they call the “privileged” minority of workers who are union members.
Such anti-union rhetoric used to be the exclusive domain of conservatives aimed at antagonizing union and non-union workers. But with labor leaders so visibly entrenched in the Democratic Party, maybe it isn’t so astonishing that leftist activists who fail to differentiate between union leadership and the rank-and-file are prone to such ideas.
Clearly, more rank-and-file involvement is needed to both challenge union officials and undercut misconceptions on the left about the labor movement.
Ultimately, real union power is not displayed by workers canvassing for Democrats. It’s exercised by workers on the job, like the 70 UE factory workers who again occupied their workplace last month and won their demands to keep the plant open while they find a new buyer, or perhaps run the factory themselves. Or the nearly 500 Seattle port truck drivers who went on strike for two weeks in February in protest against abuse and deregulation that has prevented them from organizing with the Teamsters. Or the teachers in New York City and Chicago who, along with Occupy protesters, have led fiery demonstrations against budget cuts and school closures.
Sometimes there are tactical reasons for unions to engage in electoral politics, but trade unionism is not about electing Democrats. Workers join unions to enforce decent pay and working conditions on the job. Organizing in an active union also raises the consciousness of workers around working-class issues beyond an individual workplace, like national healthcare policy and globalization. And like other social justice movements, labor cannot attribute much of its success to voting within the corporate confines of the two-party system.
Real power for workers and the oppressed exists in the streets and in the workplace, in the form of militant grassroots struggle.
Every national election points to the urgency for radicals to free the muscle of the union movement from the grip of the Democratic Party – to tighten the grip of the working class around the machinery of profit.
March 14, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, Communication Workers of America, Democratic Party, Obama, Richard Trumka, United Food and Commercial Workers |
Leave a comment
During a speech at Northwestern University’s Law School, Attorney General Eric Holder explained that the American government can kill American citizens abroad under the following conditions:
”First, the U.S. government has determined, after a thorough and careful review, that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; second, capture is not feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”
There’s one small problem with Holder’s analysis. It’s called the Constitution. Holder is wrong on the law, wrong on the politics, and on the wrong side of history.
Section 1 of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution says in part, “No State shall… deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Holder went on to explain that when it comes to national security ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same. First, this distinction is not made in the Constitution and second, the Constitution guarantees “due process of law” not just due process.
Black’s Law Dictionary 5th Edition defines “due process of law” as “Law in its regular course of administration through courts of justice.” It also states, “… no person shall be deprived of life… unless matter involved first shall have been adjudicated against him upon trial… ” For Holder to state due process of law does not involve judicial process conflicts directly with established law. As a graduate of Columbia Law School he knows better. Even a first year law student would be banished to the law library if they made such a ridiculous argument.
Even more basic than the 14th Amendment argument is the Article 1, Section 9 argument. It states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. No Bill of Attainder… shall be passed.” A Bill of Attainder is a government declaration that a person is guilty of a crime that carries the death penalty without the benefit of a trial. What else is a government determination to kill an American citizen without any judicial proceedings other than a Bill of Attainder?
As the Obama administration spokesperson for the Justice Department, Holder is wrong on the politics. Senator and candidate Obama characterized the national security policies of the Bush administration as “draconian,” “ineffective” and “counter to the values of the United States.” Candidate Obama railed against his predecessor’s counterterrorism techniques such as domestic warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding, military tribunals, and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay. Making these assertions, Holder sounds a lot like former Bush administration counsel John Yoo, the author of the opinion justifying torture. Candidate Obama promised the American people “change we can believe in.” The more these policies change, the more they look like the Bush administration, and the more they appear to have been politically motivated.
During his speech at Northwestern Holder said, “… the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.” The problem with this rationale is that America is not at war so what war principles is he referring to? The Constitution divides war powers between the Congress and the President. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution states, “The Congress shall have Power: To declare War… ” If Holder was referring to The “War on Terror” that is just a marketing scheme devised by the Bush administration to convince Americans that the powers of the Executive Branch post 9-11 needed to be expanded. Congress has authorized military action but has not formally declared war.
Holder’s comments are even more disturbing when considered in the context of President Obama signing the 2012 Defense Authorization Act (DAA). Section 1021 of the Act allows for the indefinite detention of American citizens and/or anyone who commits a “belligerent act” against the U.S. As stated above, Article 1, Section 9 states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” By signing the 2012 DAA President Obama reaffirmed Bush’s suspension of habeas corpus instead of overturning it. So now, not only can American citizens be indefinitely detained, they can also be assassinated by their own government at the will and whim of their President.
The framers of the Constitution endorsed these protections to insure that a president could not act like a monarch or dictator and unilaterally violate a citizens civil rights and liberties. In the 1960’s FBI Director Hoover spied upon and disrupted the efforts of those involved in the Civil Rights Movement by creating the Counter Intelligence Program or COINTELPRO. Hoover’s misguided fears, personal bigotry, and sense that members of the movement were “enemy combatants” engaged in “belligerent acts” against the United States resulted in the harassment and false imprisonment of conscience citizens, and many believe the assassinations of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and others fighting for equality in America. Holder is on the wrong side of history.
Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying, “those who will sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.” If a US President can order the assassination of an American citizen without judicial approval he has become no better than the dictators that we have invested invaluable time, blood, and treasure to overthrow. With these pronouncements we have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
~
Dr. Wilmer Leon is the Producer/ Host of the nationally broadcast call-in talk radio program “Inside the Issues with WilmerLeon,” and a Teaching Associate in the Department of Political Science at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Go to Dr-Leons-Prescription@facebook.com, http://www.wilmerleon.com, email: wjl3us@yahoo.com. Or http://www.twitter.com/drwleon
© 2012 InfoWave Communications, LLC.
March 14, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Eric Holder, Habeas corpus, Holder, Obama, United States Constitution |
4 Comments
On Friday, the ACLU appeared before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to argue that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires the CIA to release documents describing its use of waterboarding. The simple question at the heart of the hearing was this: is waterboarding an “intelligence method” that can be protected from disclosure under FOIA? We argued that the answer — of course not — is easy because even the president himself has declared that waterboarding is illegal. Exposing official misconduct to public scrutiny is the chief purpose of FOIA. But it cannot serve that purpose if even officially confirmed illegality is protectable.
The CIA disagreed and offered a truly astonishing view of what our laws on transparency were meant to protect from the public’s view. Under its theory, the agency may protect just about any type of activity — legal or illegal — as an “intelligence method,” and thus conceal such activities from the public. It does not matter that President Obama has declared waterboarding to be illegal, and it does not matter that the United States has prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime in the past. Even the most egregiously unlawful interrogation techniques could be kept secret as “intelligence methods” of the CIA.
Was the CIA really making this argument? We would soon find out that even the CIA’s lawyer seemed uncomfortable with the extraordinary breadth of the claim, resorting to smoke and mirrors to distract the court’s focus. Toward the end of the hearing, the three judges and the CIA’s lawyer recessed for a 40-minute classified session to discuss the documents we are seeking. When the public hearing resumed, the CIA’s lawyer made the mystifying claim that the CIA “does not concede or not concede” that waterboarding is illegal.
We scratched our heads trying to understand what exactly this meant. President Obama declared waterboarding to be illegal shortly after releasing the Bush administration’s torture memos in 2009. And the CIA never once disputed the unlawfulness of waterboarding in its filings in this case. The only possibility was that the government was trying to have it both ways. It wants to win this case without having to argue publicly that illegal conduct can be a protectable “intelligence method.”
At its core, the CIA’s argument is that the agency should be permitted to decide for itself which information should be released, and which should be suppressed. The agency believes that courts should simply defer to its decisions about secrecy. There is a time and place for that kind of deference, of course, but when it comes to public disclosure of the CIA’s illegal conduct, the CIA’s claim to immunity is fundamentally at odds with our system of checks and balances. Only through public scrutiny of official wrongdoing can the governed hold the government accountable. And only through robust judicial enforcement of our transparency laws will the public have access to the information necessary to do so.
March 14, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, Obama |
2 Comments
The American atrocities in Afghanistan roll on like a drumbeat from hell. With every affront to the human and national dignity of the Afghan people, the corporate media feign shock and quickly conclude that a few bad apples are responsible for U.S. crimes, that it’s all a mistake and misunderstanding, rather than the logical result of a larger crime: America’s attempt to dominate the world by force. But even so, with the highest paid and best trained military in the world – a force equipped with the weapons and communications gear to exercise the highest standards of control known to any military in history – one would think that commanders could keep their troops from making videos of urinating on dead men, or burning holy books, or letting loose homicidal maniacs on helpless villagers.
These three latest atrocities have brought the U.S. occupation the point of crisis – hopefully, a terminal one. But the whole war has been one atrocity after another, from the very beginning, when the high-tech superpower demonstrated the uncanny ability to track down and incinerate whole Afghan wedding parties – not just once, but repeatedly. Quite clearly, to the Americans, these people have never been more than ants on the ground, to be exterminated at will.
The Afghans, including those on the U.S. payroll, repeatedly use the word “disrespect” to describe American behavior. But honest people back here in the belly of the beast know that the more accurate term is racism. The United States cannot help but be a serial abuser of the rights of the people it occupies, especially those who are thought of as non-white, because it is a thoroughly racist nation. A superpower military allows them to act out this characteristic with impunity.
American racism allows its citizens to imagine that they are doing the people of Pakistan a favor, by sending drones to deal death without warning from the skies. The U.S. calls Pakistan an ally, when polls consistently show that its people harbor more hatred and fear of the U.S. than any other people in the world. The Pakistanis know the U.S. long propped up their military dictators, and then threatened to blow the country to Kingdom Come after 9/ll, if the U.S. military wasn’t given free rein. They know they are viewed collectively as less than human by the powers in Washington – and, if they don’t call it racism, we should, because we know our fellow Americans very well.
The U.S. lost any hope of leaving a residual military force in Iraq when it showed the utterly racist disrespect of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison, the savage leveling of Fallujah, the massacres in Haditha and so many other places well known to Iraqis, if not the American public, and the slaughter of 17 civilians stuck at a traffic circle in Nisour Square, Baghdad. What people would agree to allow such armed savages to remain in their country if given a choice?
The United States was conceived as an empire built on the labor of Blacks and the land of dead natives, an ever-expanding sphere of exploitation and plunder – energized by an abiding and general racism that is, itself, the main obstacle to establishing a lasting American anti-war movement. But, despite the peace movement’s weaknesses, the people of a world under siege by the Americans will in due time kick them out – because to live under barbarian racists is not a human option.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
March 14, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Afghanistan, Americans, Fallujah, Haditha, Iraq, United States |
1 Comment
Last week, National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast a report on the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant meltdowns. The report whitewashed failures of the utility and government by ignoring essential facts of the disaster and its impact on health.
Sunday was the first anniversary of the March 11, 2011 disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. For months, utility and government officials held back the truth, but finally admitted that three meltdowns had occurred. Those truths—potentially poisonous to industry plans to build more nuclear plants, — may not enjoy the sunlight for long. Propagandistic op-eds and reports in U.S. news media are attempting to sweep Fukushima’s history under the rug and, sadly, NPR is one of those wielding a broom.
The following claims were presented in NPR’s March 9 report by science reporter Richard Harris.
(1) Health risks are “too small to measure”
[H]ealth effects from radiation turn out to be minor compared with the other issues the people of Fukushima prefecture now face. {snip} We all watched frightening TV images, and clouds of radioactive steam and gas did erupt from the plant. That material did sometimes move over the countryside and into populated areas, so it looked like a horrible disaster. But, in the case of radiation, the dose matters. It’s true, there is no bright line that separates a safe dose of radiation from a dangerous dose, but at some point, a dose is so small that any potential health risk is simply too small to measure.
(Richard Harris, NPR, March 9)
Harris does not identify the source of that conclusion, but it’s a long-time favorite of the industry that promoted the fantasy of “too cheap to meter.” (The bill for Fukushima is estimated at $77 billion and counting.) Listeners are kept blissfully ignorant of dissenting views, including those of the National Academies of Science. However, it’s well known that cancers due to radiation exposure may take decades to develop. Equating a low rate of illness in the first year with a negligible health risk is decidedly premature.
(2) “Quick actions” were taken by Japanese officials”
Harris quotes John Boice, “a cancer epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University,” in assessing the Japanese government’s actions to protect the public from radiation, including measures like evacuation.
One big cloud did blow inland, up toward the northwest. But most of the 170,000 residents in the area were quickly evacuated. Boice says that helped limit dangerous doses. So did other quick actions by the Japanese government.
(NPR, March 9)
A “quick” evacuation is one where authorities get the public out of the area as soon as a situation arises that might result in a radioactive release. Japanese authorities instead delayed evacuation until May 15 for residents of the area around Itate, where the cumulative radiation (the estimated first year dose) was 20 millisieverts (2000 millirem) or higher. Japanese officials also failed miserably in implementing another protection action, the distribution of potassium iodide pills.
(3) “Release of “any” food with excessive radiation was “prohibited”
They prohibited the release of any food that had had increased levels of radiation in them,” [Boice] says.
(NPR, March 9)
In fact, the Japanese government failed to keep radiation-contaminated food out of the marketplace. Bloomberg Business News reported that officials failed to ban cattle shipments from Fukushima until July 19–after some beef from the area had been shipped to shipped to supermarkets. At that time, the government reported finding beef with “as much 2,300 becquerels of cesium a kilogram,” well over the government’s limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram.
Rice contaminated with cesium also made it into the marketplace, and inspectors in Singapore detected radiation “nine times the limit in cabbages imported from Japan” (Reuters). “Spinach, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, tea, milk, plums and fish have been found contaminated with cesium and iodine as far as 360 kilometers from Dai-Ichi” (Bloomberg). Those, surely, were just the tip of the iceberg because Japan had no central system for checking food for radioactive contamination. It left that task to farmers and local officials–on a voluntary basis.
(4) Smoking is “a far bigger risk to their health”
According to the NPR report, “If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day for a year, you’re getting an internal radiation dose of about 30 millisieverts.
That’s more than half the dose they got through occupational exposure. But cigarette smoke is also filled with cancer-causing chemicals, so smoking is a far bigger risk to their health.”
(NPR, March 9)
A graphic in the report shows that the radiation dose from cigarettes exceeds the expected dose from some CT (computed tomography) scans. Thus, the occupational exposure at Fukushima (which likely was greater due to poor dosimetry) also exceeded the dose from CT scans. This is noteworthy because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been urging caution in ordering CT scans due to the associated cancer risk.
The effective doses from diagnostic CT procedures are typically estimated to be in the range of 1 to 10 mSv (millisieverts). This range is not much less than the lowest doses of 5 to 20 mSv received by some of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs. These survivors, who are estimated to have experienced doses only slightly larger than those encountered in CT, have demonstrated a small but increased radiation-related excess relative risk for cancer mortality.”
(FDA website, 11 Mar 2012)
Harris reference to cigarettes is a bit of a red herring but appears to be tied to his earlier claim that the health risk is too small to measure. That resembles a claim, popular with the nuclear industry, that FDA addressed in its discussion of CT scans.
There are some that question whether there is adequate evidence for a risk of cancer induction at low doses. However, this position has not been adopted by most authoritative bodies in the radiation protection and medical arenas.
(5) “Trauma, not radiation” is the key concern
Harris correctly acknowledges the importance of recognizing and treating stress and mental health impacts that may accompany a disaster. But, it is equally important to recognize why radiation is stress inducing.
Radiation is invisible. The average person has no means to detect it and lacks the training to understand the results. He/she must rely on a profit-minded utility and government agencies—typically captured by industry–to reveal facts that could be lethal to the corporate bottom line. As one would expect in such circumstances, deception is common.
Arguably, the most primary public health concern is not, as Harris suggests, the trauma of radiation. It is the abuse of public trust that undermines every effort to properly assess, communicate and mitigate health risks. From that point of view, NPR’s deceptive report is a public health menace as well as a disappointment to listeners seeking the “highest standards of public service in journalism.” A reminder from listeners of NPR’s mission statement is in order.
Linda Lewis is a radiological emergency planning specialist and policy analyst. B.S., Emergency Management and Administration; B.S. Geoscience.
March 14, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | Fukushima, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Government of Japan, Japan, Linda Lewis, NPR, Richard Harris |
1 Comment
One Year and Counting
It’s been a year since the reactor meltdowns and catastrophic radiation releases from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor complex, and news of their far-reaching consequences still makes headlines the world over. Radioactive hot spots are still being discovered far beyond the official 13-mile “exclusion” and 18-mile “cautionary” zones surrounding the 6-reactor compound.
Recalculated estimates of massive radiation releases are repeatedly doubled, tripled or quadrupled. The National Science Foundation has said, “The release of radioactivity from Fukushima — both as atmospheric fallout and direct discharges to the ocean — represents the largest accidental release of radiation to the ocean in history.”
The list of radioactively contaminated foods, waters, soils, vegetation and export goods continues to grow longer, and government-established allowable contamination rates appear wildly arbitrary. For example, Japan intends in April to lower its permissible level of cesium in milk to 50 becquerels per kilogram from the 200 Bq/Kg that is permitted now. Evidently, an amount of contamination deemed permissible for both robust and vulnerable populations for the past year, will become four times too dangerous to consume — on April Fool’s Day.
Unprecedented and seemingly chaotic efforts to limit the spread of radiation are announced every few days. Contaminated topsoil and detritus from the forest are to be placed in metal boxes which may be stored “temporarily” in wooded areas. A plasticized wind barrier may be placed like a giant tent over the entire Fukushima Daiichi complex to retard further release of radiation to the air. The Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) began in March pouring tons of concrete from ships onto the seabed outside the destroyed reactors in an attempt to slow the spread of radionuclides that were dumped into the sea in the panicky early days of the crisis.
Broadly accepted but faulty government explanations for the meltdowns leave 400 reactors operating worldwide vulnerable to similar failures of emergency generators. Tepco is still dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water on the three uncontrolled reactors, and the waste fuel pool of reactor 4, all with extremely hot and ferociously radioactive fuel wreckage at the bottom of what used to be called “containments.” The unprecedented earthquake turned them into cracked and leaking sieves that are still vulnerable to Japan’s daily earthquakes.
A selective review of the news is all that space allows:
July 12-18: Beef contaminated, consumed, banned
Beef contaminated with cesium was sold at markets before a ban and recall was issued. Tests on straw at a farm in Koriyama city in Fukushima Prefecture showed cesium levels as high as 378 times the legal limit. Tokyo’s metropolitan government said high levels of cesium, nearly five times what’s permitted, were detected in meat from a cow shipped to a packing plant in Tokyo from a farm in Koriyama.
Sept. 9: Japan triples its radiation release estimate
Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency reported that radioactive cesium-137 and iodine-131 released into the Pacific Ocean by Fukushima’s operators between March 21 and April 30 amounted to 15,000 trillion becquerels, or “terabecquerels” — more than triple the amount (4,720 terabecquerels) earlier estimated by the Tepco. (See chart at end)
Oct. 2: Plutonium fell far beyond evacuation zone
Plutonium, was been detected 24 miles from Fukushima according to government researchers. The official exclusion zone is only 12.4 miles wide.
Oct. 15: Hot spots in Tokyo
Independent groups found 20 radioactive “hot spots” inside Tokyo, 150 miles from the disaster zone, that were contaminated with cesium as heavily as parts of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, in Ukraine, site of a similar radiation disaster in 1986. Kiyoshi Toda, a radiation expert and medical doctor at Nagasaki University told the New York Times, “Radioactive substances are entering people’s bodies from the air, from the food. It’s everywhere.”
Oct. 27: Worst oceanic contamination ever recorded
France’s Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety reported that the amount of cesium-137 dispersed to the Pacific Ocean was the greatest single radioactive contamination of the sea “ever observed.” The institute estimated that 27 “petabecquerels” (27 million billion becquerels) of cesium-137 poured into the sea. This is equal to a staggering 729,000 curies.
Nov. 17: Sale of contaminated rice banned
The sale of rice from 154 farms in Fukushima Prefecture was banned after it was found contaminated with cesium exceeding
government limits. The same week, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences said that levels of cesium in the region’s soil would “severely impair” food production in all of eastern Fukushima and even neighboring areas.
Nov. 26: Cesium in fallout fell all over Japan
Radioactive cesium dispersed by Fukushima fell over the entire territory of Honshu, Japan’s largest and most heavily populated island, the major daily Asahi Shimbun reported.
Dec. 6: Cesium in baby food on shelves 7 months
The giant food company Neji Holdings announced the recall of 400,000 cans of its powdered baby milk formula after it was found poisoned with cesium-137 and cesium-134. Packaged in April, toward the end of Fukushima’s worst radiation releases, the baby food was distributed mostly in May and could have been repeatedly consumed by infants for seven months.
Dec. 12: Tokyo schoolyard’s 9-month cesium hazard
The concentration of cesium found in a Tokyo schoolyard, 150 miles from Fukushima was over 10 times the government-established level requiring disposal. From April to December, highly contaminated tarps were evidently left in a heap beside the school’s gym. The Environment Ministry gave official permission to incinerate the covers, but tons of radioactively contaminated incinerator ash has caused broad public protest because of objections to its being disposed of in forested areas.
Dec. 12: Sea contamination 50 million times normal
A study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Society published in Environmental Science & Technology found that concentrations of cesium-137 at Fukushima’s discharge points to the sea peaked at more than 50 million times expected levels. Concentrations 18 miles offshore were higher than those measured in the ocean after Chernobyl. Lead author and Woods Hole senior scientist Ken Buesseler told Forbes, “We don’t know how this might affect benthic [bottom dwelling and subsurface] marine life, and with a half-life of 30 years, any cesium-137 accumulating in sediments or groundwater could be a concern for decades to come.”
Dec. 19: Up to 14,000 U.S. deaths linked to fallout
The peer reviewed International Journal of Health Services reported that as many as 14,000 excess deaths in the United States appear linked to radioactive fallout from Fukushima. The rise in reported deaths after March 17 was largest among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks. The study by Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention’s weekly reports, was the first on Fukushima health hazards to be published in a scientific journal.
Feb. 11: Scouring fallout from 8,000 square miles
The New York Times reported in its business section that Japan intends to “rehabilitate” contaminated areas that total over 8,000 square miles — an area nearly as big as New Jersey.
Feb. 26: One-quarter of U.S. reactors can’t survive likely quakes
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported that 27 of 104 operating reactors in the United States face current earthquake magnitude predictions more powerful than the reactors were designed and built to withstand.
Feb. 28: Cesium limits for rice will not be enforced
The government said farmers would be allowed to plant rice on land with cesium contamination above the new 100 becquerels-per-kilogram limit for crop land. The new limit takes effect in April, long after Japan arbitrarily set a contamination limit of 500-Bq/Kg following last year’s massive radiation releases.
2011: Emergency backup generators ‘not designed to work’
The official explanation for Fukushima’s loss-of-coolant and radiation releases is that back-up diesel generators were wrecked by the March 11 tsunami. In his Nov. 2011 book Vulture’s Picnic (Dutton), Greg Palast smashes this theory — and highlights reactor vulnerability everywhere — writing that the diesels may have destroyed themselves just by being turned on. Since aerial photos now show that the buildings housing the diesels were not wrecked, Palast recounts that 30 years ago he and diesel expert R. D. Jacobs suspected problems with the diesels proposed for U.S. nukes. They forced the builder of New York’s Shoreham reactor to test its three generators under emergency conditions. One after another, all three failed when their crankshafts snapped, just ad Jacobs predicted. Shoreham never went online.
Interviewing another diesel engineer, Palast found that the diesels were “designed or even taken from, cruise ship engine rooms or old locomotives.” They need 30 minutes to warm up and time to build crankshaft speed, before adding the “load” of the generator. In a nuclear emergency, the diesels have to go from stationary to taking a full load in less than ten seconds, Palast reports. They’re not made for a “crash start.” He asked the expert, “You’re saying emergency diesels can’t work in an emergency?” His answer was, “Actually, they’re just not designed for it.”
— New resources: “Lessons from Fukushima,” Feb. 2012, by Greenpeace; and “Fukushima in review: A complex disaster, a disastrous response,” March 2012, by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Radiation amounts FYI:
1 becquerel = 1 atomic disintegration per second
37 billion becquerels = 1 curie
1 trillion becquerels (1 terabecquerel) = 27 curies
1 million billion becquerels (1 petabecquerel) = 27,000 curies
An area far beyond the official 18-mile restriction zone around Fukushima has been declared in need of decontamination. Besides power washing urban areas, this will involve removing about 2 inches of topsoil from local farms as well as dead leaves and other debris from radiation-laden forest floors. The government has announced it intends to clear about 934 square miles of soil — an area larger than greater Tokyo (above). “So far, nobody has any idea where any contaminated soil will be dumped,” reported The Economist, in “Hot spots and blind spots: the mounting human costs of Japan’s nuclear disaster,” Oct. 8, 2011.
John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and anti-war group in Wisconsin, and edits its Quarterly.
March 14, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | Fukushima, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Japan, Pacific Ocean, Tokyo, Tokyo Electric Power Company |
Leave a comment
The International diamond-regulatory system, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, set up to end the trade in blood diamonds is under pressure to ban diamonds from Israel because human rights activists state they are funding the Israeli military, which stands accused of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity by the UN Human Rights Council.
Aletho News
Aletho News 