Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race
Towards another mushroom cloud
People in power, well
They’ll do anything to keep their crown
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now
Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now”

— Mary Gauthier, “Mercy Now” ¹

We have heard much about Japan’s Fukushima Unit 4 nuclear spent fuel pool and the huge amount of radioactivity that could be released if that pool were to go dry, crack, fall apart or collapse.² As former Japanese diplomat to the United Nations, Akio Matsumura, recently warned the world:

The highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima-Daiichi power plants present a clear threat to the people of Japan and the world. Reactor 4 and the nearby common spent fuel pool contain over 11,000 highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies, many of which are exposed to the open air. The cesium-137, the radioactive component contained in these assemblies, present at the site is 85 times larger than the amount released during the Chernobyl accident. Another magnitude 7.0 earthquake would jar them from their pool or stop the cooling water, which would lead to a nuclear fire and meltdown. The nuclear disaster that would result is beyond anything science has ever seen.  Calling it a global catastrophe is no exaggeration. If political leaders understand the situation and the potential catastrophe, I find it difficult to understand why they remain silent. The following leaves little to question:

1. Many scientists believe that it will be impossible to remove the 1,535 fuel assemblies in the pool of Reactor 4 within two or three years.

2. Japanese scientists give a greater than 90 percent  probability that an earthquake of at least 7.0 magnitude will occur in the next three years in the close vicinity of Fukushia-Daiichi.

3. The crippled building of Reactor 4 will not stand through another strong earthquake.

4. Japan and the TEPCO do not have adequate nuclear technology and experience to handle a disaster of such proportions alone.³

It really does make one wonder how all of the world’s aging reactors will be dealt with if there is a global economic collapse. What we are witnessing as events race forward appears to be the convergence of socio-economic collapse — the 500 year old banking system based on fraudulent accounting tricks — together with the crumbling and cracking of the faulty technostructure put in place in the last century. Roads and bridges fall into disrepair and cities like Detroit will simply revert to green farmland, a natural process of the cycling of ecosystems where humans play their role and then bow out once they have exhausted their industrious energies. In the case of nuclear power plants, the waste remains radioactive for a good 10,000 years and the process for safely storing it has not yet been invented.⁴

Let’s go back in time to relive the astounding events of 3/11 in order to put this situation in context. On the 11th of March, 2011 at 14:46 JST, a Magnitude 9.0, “the largest earthquake recorded in Japan,” occurred with the epicenter  approximately 70 kilometers east of the Oshika peninsula in Tohoku, at an ocean depth of 32 kilometers. The Japan Meteorological Agency Seismic Intensity – JMA SI measured at 7 in Kurihara City of Miyagi Prefecture and 6+ in 28 cities and towns including in Fukushima Prefecture.⁵ The trembler lasted six minutes.⁶ Typically, the Japanese measurement of intensity is about half to a quarter as large a number as magnitude⁷. The JMA SI is derived from the Mercalli intensity scale which is:

a seismic scale used for measuring the intensity of an earthquake. It measures the effects of an earthquake, and is distinct from the moment magnitude  usually reported for an earthquake (sometimes described as the obsolete Richter magnitude), which is a measure of the energy released. The intensity of an earthquake is not totally determined by its magnitude.⁸

According to the Wall Street Journal which reported the research of Tohoku University geologists, the following points are worth noting:

*  [S]eismic risk at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has increased because the magnitude 9 earthquake jolted the plates underneath the area into a more precarious position.

*  [O]ver 24,000 tremors around Iwaki, in the seven and a half months following March 11. That number is far higher than the 1,300 quakes detected in the same area in the nine years before then.

*  Given that a large earthquake occurred in Iwaki not long ago, we think it is possible for a similarly strong earthquake to happen in Fukushima.

The only ray of hope I could glean from this scenario is that “seismicity near the FNPP plant is relatively low compared to that near Iwaki,” but Iwaki is only a few miles to the south of the FNPP. “A fault line that runs close to the plant could be weakened by” shifting seismic fluids.⁹

The Tohoku University geologists make clear the daily quakes Japan experiences are not anomalous but according to a well studied and documented pattern:

The Iwaki earthquake (M 7.0) occurred in a previous seismicity gap on 11 April 2011 and it was one of the major aftershocks following the Tohoku-oki mainshock and the strongest one hit the Japan land area….The compressional stress regime is therefore expected to continue to build up in the overriding plate in NE Japan, which has potential to cause reactivation of the reverse faults and therein generate large crustal earthquakes, such as the 2008 Iwate-Miyagi earthquake that occurred about 200 km north of FNPP and the 2007 Niigata earthquake (M 6.8) in the back-arc area of NE Japan. Therefore, much attention should be paid to the FNPP seismic safety in the near future.¹⁰

Their report is supported by other research that claims “[a]ftershocks along Fukushima, Ibaraki borders may take over 100 years to subside [and this region is] relatively close to the damaged Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant”.¹¹

As Kobe University seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi noted to a government panel in 2005, “[a]n earthquake and its seismic thrust can hit multiple parts” of a nuclear plant and result in a “severe accident”.¹² No one listened to Professor Ishibashi then (ironically his name is translated as “stone bridge”) but they sure the heck should have!

In addition, Tokyo University geologists have now warned that chances of “a new big earthquake” in Japan are 75 percent in the next four years, and that Japan has drastically underestimated the power of earthquakes in their building standards. Nuclear plants are vastly under-prepared for the magnitude of large quakes, having been based on projections that are now outdated and debunked. In essence, it is impossible to build nuclear power plants to withstand major earthquakes.¹³)

From the official Japanese sources themselves we can see that the 3/11 earthquake intensity was 6+ and that it was indeed strong enough to destroy at least Unit 1 at the FNPP. According to at least two reputable sources Unit 1 was destroyed primarily due to seismic activity and not the tsunami or failed back up generators (although those events contributed).¹⁴

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the Japanese Government — the Keystone Cops teamed up with the Larry Curly and Moe outfit — is still telling us that we should not worry. Tepco recently complained to critics that:

The No. 4 reactor building is not tilted and it, including the storage pool, will not be destroyed by a quake…TEPCO officials also explained that the steel support at the base of the pool and concrete wall had been reinforced by last July, which has increased by 20 percent the leeway against a possible quake. In addition, the utility conducted a simulation exercise using analytical models that showed that even if a lower -6 intensity quake were to strike the plant again, it would not collapse.¹⁵

It sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo to me — “20 percent” improvements do not inspire confidence in a region ridden with constant seismic activity. Such statements are absurdly overconfident on the face. The FNPP complex looks like a war zone which is at any rate not as fit as it originally was, and even if in pristine condition may not handle a major earthquake. Nevertheless, let’s hope the fools are right this time because we could all use a little Mercy Now. Short of the Hand of Grace intervening, people of good conscience had better act quickly to solve this problem.

1. Mary Gauthier, “Mercy Now”
2. Japan’s Near Miss With Massive Nuclear Catastrophe: The Crisis Continues
3. Fukushima Daiichi: It May Be too Late Unless the Military Steps in
4. The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World’s Most Dangerous Fuel
5. The 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake -Portal-
6. 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami
7. Earthquake Information
8. Mercalli intensity scale
9. Could Fukushima Daiichi Be Ground Zero for the Next Big One?
10. Tomography of the 2011 Iwaki earthquake (M 7.0) and Fukushima nuclear power plant area
11. Aftershocks along Fukushima, Ibaraki borders may take over 100 years to subside
12. Earthquake and Nuke Fatigue
13. The Fukushima Lie (Die Fukushima-Lüge – English Subtitles
14. Tepco’s Cheapskate Tactics Put World at Risk
15. Doomsday scenarios spread about No. 4 reactor at Fukushima plant

When her breathing slows, and then turns ever so erratic,
I break into my lover’s dreams to steal whatever sleep I can …. See
how her belly begins to show! My arms barely encircle her from behind
as she banks her Yamaha 450 through the radioactive wasteland of our town.
After 3 days on the road, we return to find everything we’ve ever built or grown—
the people we loved—piled into mountains of debris they’ll say equal 40 years of trash.
Women unaware that their nipples and areolas glow faintly green in the half-dark
kneel in mud giving suck to babies who retch up everything they swallow.
Countless times her rear tire blows, and she swerves into the path
of the same oncoming relief truck, always empty of supplies,
but not once have we tried to make each other wake up.

After making love on the futon, I notice faint scars
starting at her underarms and running down her sides
like an old map of tides surrounding the island of her flesh,
and ask if what she let slip about having been abused is really true.
She squeaks out a high-pitched laugh, says Only by you! and closes her eyes again,
Truth be told, I often see dreams like that inside her troubled dreams, but in them
I take the shape of an advancing wall of water, and despite her cries, I cannot stop!

It’s not hard to imagine her as a child, for I know we must have drunk from similar cups
in kindergarten, hanging from a string by the sink, or upturned on a faucet. We shared
every disease with the others in the school, for if nothing else, at least we learned that
we are one. And as we grew, you can bet everyone at her dinner table stuck chopsticks
into a common nabe pot of whatever fit her mother’s daily budget: vegetables and fish,
chicken, the cheaper sorts of meat, boiled together in a broth made of kombu seaweed,
katsuobushi dried bonito flakes, shoyu, mirin, miso, sake; and of course, fat udon noodles
we kids fought over at the end. Now we breathe radiation escaping from the incinerated
wreckage with everybody else. What they burn in the air burns in our bones, yet they cart
debris away to prefectural landfills throughout Japan. The government simply will not let us
suffer alone. But still we don’t sleep well. And if truth be told, our dreams should not be told.

There’s even an upside to the parade of medical journal articles linking red meat to coronary heart disease and cancer deaths. As long as people are taking about beef’s ick factor and link to progressive diseases, they’re not talking about the “third rail” of meat safety – mad cow disease.

It’s has been almost ten years since the U.S.’s first mad cow was discovered. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. beef exports evaporated within 24 hours when Mexico, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, and 90 other countries banned US beef. The only reason the European Union didn’t ban U.S. beef was because it had already banned it for excessive use of growth hormones!

Now the U.S. is trying to win back Japan and China’s business, not fully restored since the first U.S. mad cow, in a trade version of the golden rule or “turnabout is fair play.” Specifically, the U.S. would agree to resume beef imports from other countries it has hitherto banned because of their mad cow risk (like Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands) in the hopes that the U.S.’s holdout trading partners will do the same, under the proposed rule.

“Quite simply, this proposed rule will show the United States is willing to talk the talk and walk the walk with regard to following international standards developed by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE),” says National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Director of Legislative Affairs Kent Bacus. “It’s difficult for us to continue to demand that our trading partners comply with OIE standards when we don’t,” agrees Josh Winegarner, government relations director for the Texas Cattle Feeders Association.

But R-CALF USA, a national cattle group often at odds with the government, is unhappy with the impending we’ll-eat-it-if-you-do quid pro quo. “Exposing U.S. consumers and U.S. livestock to a heightened risk of BSE [mad cow] introduction is irresponsible and contrary to pledges made by the Obama Administration during his campaign,” says the group.

Under OIE criteria, countries can have “negligible”, “controlled”, or “undetermined” mad cow risks based on the strength of their feed bans (feeding ruminants-to-ruminants like cows to cows), control of animal imports from risky countries and disease surveillance. OIE gave the U.S. a surprising “controlled risk” status despite three identified mad cows but the classification failed to pry open closed export markets as hoped. In fact, trade officials now say the U.S.’s controlled risk status costs it $3 billion a year in foreign sales and are seeking “negligible risk” status.

Negligible risk status under OIE guidelines requires “there has been no case of BSE or, if there has been a case, every case of BSE has been demonstrated to have been imported and has been completely destroyed” and that safety measure have been observed for at least seven years. If a mad cow case or cases were home grown, a country can still seek negligible risk status, according to OIE criteria, if it can demonstrate that all cattle “reared with the BSE cases” and consuming the same potentially contaminated feed or all cattle born from the same herd are “permanently identified, and their movements controlled, and, when slaughtered or at death, are completely destroyed.”

But even under those circumstances, the U.S. doesn’t make the cut because herd mates and feed mates of the first U.S. mad cow were not “identified”, “destroyed” or had their “movements controlled” as required. Eleven out of 25 head of cattle which authorities considered “likely to have eaten the same potentially infectious feed” as the Washington state cow were never found says the Associated Press. The fail rate was considerably higher with subsequent U.S. mad cows.

Mad cow disease belongs to a family of fatal brain diseases or “transmissible encephalopathies” and is known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows, scrapie in sheep and goats and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk. The diseases are thought to be transmitted by prions, invisible infectious particles that are not viruses or bacteria, but proteins.

Though prions are not technically “alive” because they lack a nucleus, they manage to reproduce. And though not technically “alive,” prions are almost impossible to “kill” or destroy because they are not inactivated by cooking, heat, ammonia, bleach, hydrogen peroxide, benzene, alcohol, phenol, lye, formaldehyde or radiation. In fact, alcohol makes prions more transmissible because it binds them to metal like surgical instruments. Nor is it safe to just dump prion material in landfills because prions endure in soil for years and contaminate it.

Many have heard mad cow scare stories like: people with Alzheimer’s disease really have variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human version of mad cow disease; dogs, cats, pigs and fish are at risk; mad cow is spread by flies and mosquitoes; and mad cow is in milk or cosmetics. But prions are scary enough without urban legends to embellish them.

In humans, mad cow prions can cause a fatal neurological disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). But the government is quick to point out that humans get other forms of CJD that are not variant, including classic or sporadic – which occur spontaneously – and hereditary CJD – which is genetic. The government also says there are clinical and symptom differences between the two and that classic or sporadic CJD tends to strike the old (at an average age of 68) while vCJD tends to strike the young (the average age in Britain was 28). The problem is doctors don’t know which type of CJD a patient has without a brain biopsy, usually after death – just as veterinarians don’t know which cows have mad cow until after death.

On December 23, 2003, as the nation headed into Christmas, the USDA announced that a Holstein cow, imported from Canada and slaughtered in Moses Lake, Washington, on December 9 for human food, tested positive for mad cow disease. Ann Veneman, agriculture secretary and other USDA officials said the cow was discovered because she was a “downer” (unable to walk), indicating that the mad cow testing program worked since it screened downers as the main source of mad cow risk. But three workers who saw the animal said it walked just fine.

What followed, believe it or not, were congressional hearings, a federal criminal investigation, and a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation largely over whether or not the animal walked to slaughter. Because if the animal looked fine and walked under its own steam to slaughter, the entire federal mad cow testing program was misconceived and was letting millions of similar animals into the food supply. But if the slaughterhouse workers were lying, as the government hoped, and the animal was prodded or fork-lifted to slaughter, we might have a farming system that values money over living things and chews them up and spits them out, but at least the mad cow alert system works.

In testimony before Congress, USDA inspector general Phyllis K. Fong blamed “procedural errors” for the conflicting data about whether or not the animal walked, and said an employee “who alleged that the BSE-positive cow was ambulatory and healthy when it arrived at the facility described a different animal from the one that arrived in the same trailer and later tested BSE-positive.”

Unfortunately, that was not the only government discrepancy. There were also two very different versions of what happened to the meat from the Washington state cow. The government said in its final report that, “By December 27, 2003, FDA had located all potentially-infectious product rendered from the BSE-positive cow in Washington State. This product was disposed of in a landfill in accordance with Federal, State and local regulations.”  But the Los Angeles Times reported that despite “a voluntary recall aimed at recovering all 10,000 pounds of beef slaughtered at the plant the day the Washington state cow was killed, some meat, which could have contained the Washington cow, was sold to restaurants in several Northern California counties.” And eaten, it turns out.

“In an interview, Alameda County health officer Dr. Anthony Iton recalled that in early January 2004, almost a month after the initial discovery, state health officials informed him that five restaurants in the Oakland area had received soup bones from the lot of tainted beef,” says the Times. “It immediately dispatched inspectors to the restaurants. But it was too late; soup made from the bones had been eaten. He was particularly disturbed to learn that none of the restaurant owners had received written notice of the recall and that federal inspectors did not visit them until 10 days after the recall.”

There was a second affront to food consumers besides letting the mad cow into the food supply and lying about it: bound by a USDA rule, the California Department of Health Services did not release the identities of stores or restaurants that purchased the meat, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “Alameda and Santa Clara counties have been informed by the state that 11 local restaurants and a market purchased soup bones from the suspect lot, but they have also declined to identify which establishments purchased them,” said the Chronicle. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture insists the recall is precautionary and the meat poses no health risk.”

USDA spokesman Matthew Baun actually said it was the public’s responsibility to find out if any food they ate was at risk because the recall information was a trade secret! It is “up to consumers to check with their grocers, butchers or restaurants to find out if any of the recalled meat may have landed on their tables,” said Baun. “We are prohibited from releasing information that companies would consider proprietary. If you are concerned whether you may have purchased the product, you can call your retail store. They would know. . . . The only way to know for sure is to contact stores.”

Being “concerned” whether you “purchased” a product that could cause certain death struck the public as a glib understatement and four years later similar outrage over  government shielding of outlets selling meat from sick and abused cattle killed for the National School Lunch Program at Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California prompted the USDA to reverse its policy protecting sellers, if not growers, of dangersous meat.

More Mad Cows and More Damage Control

Because of suspicions that feeding ruminants-to-ruminants and making cows cannibals could cause or spread mad cow disease, the U.S. had already banned the “protein recyling” practice in 1997. But one week after the Washington state mad cow surfaced, the USDA strengthened controls against mad cow disease by banning downer cattle in the food supply. It also banned “specified risk material“(SRM) from cows in the human food supply which included brains, skulls, eyes, spinal cords, tonsils, spleens, lymph tissues, and most of the vertebral column and small intestine, said to be at highest risk.

While scientific literature suggests that all cattle tissue, not just SRM, can harbor BSE infectivity, the government submits that “the presence of PrP [BSE] does not necessarily indicate the presence of BSE infectivity,”–meaning it may be in the meat but you may not catch it. Not too reassuring.

Japan and South Korea, two of the U.S.’s top-three beef importing nations were also not reassured by the new safety controls and withheld their business. And even as Mike Johanns, who succeeded Ann Veneman as agriculture secretary, tried to woo back Japan’s $1.5 billion a year business and South Korea’s $800 million,¹ the unthinkable happened. A second mad cow was found in the U.S. and unlike the first cow, which had been born in Canada, the second cow had never left its Texas ranch.²

Worse, the 12-year-old “cream-colored Brahma cross” had been suspected of mad cow eleven months after the Washington cow, but the government did not tell the public until seven months later. It took the government three tests to identify the cow as positive, the last test unilaterally ordered by USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong over Johanns’ head. Asked why the United States’ best technology was missing mad cows Johanns conceded to reporters that prion distribution in a brain could make “it possible for one sample to test negative while another sample might test positive,” reported the Houston Chronicle. He also conceded that “the protocol we developed just a few years ago to conduct the tests, including the type of antibody used, might not be the best option today.”

And there were other disturbing facts. The cream-colored Brahma cross was sold at a livestock sale despite reports that she was a downer. (“The cow had always been excitable and had fallen while she was being loaded to go to the market, but that this was not unusual behavior for her,” the owner told government investigators.) The buyer sent the Brahma cross to the slaughterhouse four days later, but when the truck arrived at H&B Packing in Waco, she was dead and the truck turned around and transported her instead to Champion Pet Food, across town. And 350 of her possible herd mates and offspring were slaughtered “and possibly in the human food supply, even before the government inquiry began,” reported the Dallas Morning News. The cow’s owner was “relatively sure” he had not kept any offspring from the cow at the facility but “there were essentially no records maintained on the index farm,” reported the government.

Yet despite selling an animal that couldn’t walk for human food, maintaining no records and the business’ very murky ownership, according to the government, the identity of the ranch and its owner was protected. Even more outrageous, the ranch was cleared to resume selling meat within one month. Why should a livestock operation be penalized for producing food that could kill people?

Meanwhile, the trading relationship with Japan was roiling. One month after Japan agreed to start importing U.S. beef again in early 2005, SRM – specified risk material -was found in a U.S. beef shipment and the ban was immediately re-imposed. Oops. The USDA conducted a self-policing “export verification audit” to reassure Japan and it just made things worse. Nine slaughterhouses were found in noncompliance with SRM policies, according to the audit, and 29 downers went into a human food supply, 20 not tested for mad cow disease. The reason the cows were not tested for mad cow almost sounds like a joke. Government inspectors “did not believe that they had the authority” to go into the pens where the animals were held and get samples, reported the Houston Chronicle.

In answers to written questions from Japanese agriculture officials, Johanns said the 29 cattle were healthy until they arrived at the slaughterhouses, “where they suddenly became unable to walk because of injury or other factors,” reported Eiji Hirose of Yomiuri Shimbun/Daily Yomiuri – kind of like the Texas rancher’s “excitable” cow. Legally, downers could be slaughtered for food if they had suffered an acute injury after passing inspection. But Johanns did not give any “clear evidence for his conclusion,” wrote Hirose, and his overall comments appeared “to show the U.S. government does not take the issue seriously enough.” Japan’s agriculture minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, was similarly unappeased and told Johanns in a phone conversation, he was concerned about SRM and downer cows. Japan then sent a team of officials to inspect US slaughterhouses firsthand.

Can anyone guess what happened next? Even before Japanese inspectors arrived in the U.S., another mad cow was found. On March 13, 2006, a deep-red, crossbred beef cow from an Alabama ranch, estimated to be ten years old, became the third confirmed U.S. mad cow.

Like the Texas cow, the Alabama cow was a downer, initial tests failed to disclose her mad cow status and the identity of the Alabama ranch and its owner were protected. Also, like the Texas cow, she had recently given birth – she “had at her side a 2- to 3-week old red Charolais cross female calf” at the time of her death, said the government report – and her herd mates were not found or kept out of the food supply, though 37 farms were investigated.

The audit for Japan and mishandling of the first three mad cows are not the only red flags for U.S. beef safety. Lester Friedlander, DVM, a USDA federal meat inspector for 10 years, told United Press International in 2005 that a USDA official told him not to say anything if he ever discovered a case of mad cow disease, and that he knew of cows that had tested positive at private laboratories, but were ruled negative by the USDA.

And a 2008 Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) report to assess safe removal of specified risk material (SRM) in U.S. slaughterhouses found the same equipment was being used at one facility on animals at high risk of mad cow and other animals because, according to the supervisory public health veterinarian, “there were no ‘visible SRMs’ on the equipment,” as if prions could be seen. The government report also says FSIS Headquarters officials “believed the sanitizer spray was sufficient to address the problem,” as if prions aren’t practically indestructible. Maybe it was even alcohol.

Cluster Bombs

Even before the 2003 Washington state cow, agribusiness recognized the damage that rumors of mad cow or other lethal agents in the food supply could do and lobbied lawmakers to pass food disparagement laws in the late 1990s. Oprah Winfrey herself was tried in Amarillo in 1997 for “disparaging” beef when she remarked on her show that she would never eat a hamburger again after learning of the forced cannibalism on U.S. farms, causing cattlemen to lose $11 million when prices plummeted. She was acquitted.

Since the three U.S. mad cows, beef producers and officials are quick to reassure the public when CJD cases surface that the brain diseases are not variant CJD from eating meat. Still, the damage control is tough when cases occur in clusters since sporadic or classic CJD by definition occur randomly and not in clusters.

Soon after the Washington state cow, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigated a potential cluster of more than 13 CJD cases, thought by some to be linked to food served at the Garden State Racetrack in southern New Jersey. But the CDC issued a report that found five of the cases were sporadic CJD, not variant CJD; six were “probable” CJD but not variant; three were not CJD; and three were still under investigation. The occurrence of 14 CJD-related cases over 9.25 years “would not be unusual,” said the CDC.

Apparent clusters of nine people in Idaho in 2005³ , four in northeastern Indiana in 2007 and two in Tennessee in 2009, were similarly smoothed over. And when a CJD patient was admitted to an Amarillo, Texas hospital in 2008 causing cattle futures to tank, a beef-cattle specialist with the Amarillo office of Texas AgriLife Extension assured the public the case was sporadic not variant – before test results were even in. Two years later, there were more questions about CJD cases in Texas. A map of “CJD Cases by County 2000–2010″ on the Texas Department of State Health Services website shows two red areas that look like, well, clusters.

Nonetheless, Americans seem less rattled about beef scares than are countries they export to. As the U.S. and South Korea prepared to sign the free-trade agreement, KORUS FTA, in 2008, which included wide provisions for beef trade, actual riots over the risk of mad cow in U.S. beef broke out in South Korea. “We Don’t Like the FDA,” “Mad Cow, You Eat It!” and “Send Mad Cow to the Presidential Office!” chanted demonstrators at candlelight vigils in 22 cities, some dressed in cow costumes.

Fueling the riots were reports in local media that Koreans are genetically more vulnerable to vCJD, that mad cow prions were in cosmetics, diapers and sanitary napkins and television images of downer cows at Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California fork-lifted and “water-boarded” to slaughter for National School Lunch Program a few months earlier. And even as President George W. Bush assured South Korean president Lee Myung-bak at Camp David during the trade negotiations that U.S. beef was safe, a case of CJD appeared in a 22-year-old Virginia woman who had never left the country. It was an unusually young age for CJD if it weren’t variant.

As the U.S. now seeks “negligible risk” status for mad cow disease, there’s no reason to believe its institutionalized ineptitude, denial and misinformation about beef risks has changed and therefore that such a classification means anything. In fact, there is only one government safeguard that beef consumers can count on: if more mad cows surface, the names of the ranches that produce them will be protected.

An earlier version of this report appeared on Truth-out.org

1. Art Hovey, “Cattlemen leery of reopening border”,  Lee Newspapers, February 10, 2005
2. Betsy Blaney, “Cattle Herd Must Stay Put—Texas Ranch Where Diseased Cow Originated Is Quarantined,” Associated Press, July 1, 2005
3. Rare Disease Raises Questions—Idaho Cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, Herald Journal, October 23, 2005

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
– Henry David Thoreau

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
– E.F. Schumacher

Since March 27 the Fukushima region has experienced three medium sized earthquakes not to mention a typhoon to boot.¹ This is important because a Japanese engineer recently admitted that the situation at the Fukushima No. 1 power station is still dangerous and the unit four fuel pool is vulnerable to earthquakes.² Due to unit four’s fragile condition–the building is said to be leaning to one side–Tokyo Power Company (Tepco) is “working to fortify the crumpled outer shell of the building” in order to prevent collapse.³ After the most recent earthquake Tepco announced there was no problem, but the “Fukuichi live camera” which records activity at the site was shifted slightly to the left by the tremor.⁴

An accident to the fuel pool could set off a chain of events involving “a total of 1760 metric tons of fresh and used nuclear fuel” among the six reactors at the disaster site.⁵ According to Takao Yamada, Expert Senior Writer at the Mainichi Daily News, Tepco dismissed the idea of injecting extra concrete to reinforce the unit four building just after 3/11.

Former Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Sumio Mabuchi, who was appointed to the post of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s advisor on the nuclear disaster immediately after its outbreak, proposed the injection of concrete from below the No. 4 reactor to the bottom of the storage pool, Chernobyl-style. An inspection of the pool floor, however, led TEPCO to conclude that the pool was strong enough without additional concrete. The plans were scrapped, and antiseismic reinforcements were made to the reactor building instead.

‘Because sea water was being pumped into the reactor, the soundness of the structure (concrete corrosion and deterioration) was questionable. There also were doubts about the calculations made on earthquake resistance as well,’ said one government source familiar with what took place at the time. ‘It’s been suggested that the building would be reinforced, and spent fuel rods would be removed from the pool under those conditions. But fuel rod removal will take three years. Will the structure remain standing for that long? Burying the reactor in a concrete grave is like building a dam, and therefore expensive. I think that it was because TEPCO’s general shareholders’ meeting was coming up (in June 2011) that the company tried to keep expenses low.’⁶

Let’s get this straight: because of an upcoming share holders meeting Tepco could not be bothered to go the extra five yards and spend necessary money to solidify the building with a stoop from below (excluding the idea of the sarcophagus)? What kind of blunder is this (and it continues), putting the inane greed of money junkies in their boardrooms over the welfare of millions of people and the environment? Life on Earth will be permanently affected or destroyed if the Fukushima power station goes up in a radiological blaze, potentially setting fire to 1760 tons of fuel. This could result in tens of times more radiation than was released in 1986 in the Ukraine.

Thus we have Tepco, the limited liability corporation par excellence– privatize profits and externalize costs. But nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson noted that “the clean up is going to cost around a half a trillion dollars.”⁷ This will wipe out any savings that came from using nuclear energy in the first place.

This news comes on the heels of learning of revised estimates of the initial Fukushima disaster which put the amount of cesium released into the air and water as high as 90% of Chernobyl releases. This is a far cry from original assessments by the Japanese government that radiation was just 10 or 15% as much.

“Table S2. Estimated 137Cs releases and inventories…. Total air deposition 36 Far field air deposition and air transport model Stohl et al…. Total direct release to ocean 27 by July 18 (22 by April 8) Assessment of ocean 137Cs within 30 km of shore Bailly du Bois et al.”

• Highest estimates by foreign researchers: Fukushima 63 quadrillion becquerals;
• Japanese government highest estimate: 40 quadrillion bq;
• Chernobyl estimate after two decades of study: 70 quadrillion bq⁸

* (Special thanks to enenews.com for bringing technical literature on the Fukushima disaster to public attention.)

Nuclear Fission Fueled By Political Corruption and Financial Terrorism

Yamada offers this blistering critique of Japan’s profoundly dysfunctional political system:

The government continues to take regressive steps in spite of the torrent of criticism it has received and the lessons that should have been learned since the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear disaster.
This is evidenced in the fact that starting this week, which marks the beginning of a new fiscal year, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) and the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan (NSC) have no budget. The new nuclear regulatory agency that was supposed to begin operations on April 1 in NISA’s stead is now floundering amid resistance in the Diet from opposition parties. In other words, government agencies overseeing nuclear power now have an even more diminished presence….The situation doesn’t do much for morale, however. Back-scratching relationships between government ministries, the indecision of both the ruling and opposition parties, and the unchanging fact that much of the current crisis is still left in the hands of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) remains the same.⁹

The stockholders won’t pay, they get bailed out by taxpayers. We will all pay through the sweat of our brows and loss of life and health from the radioactive fallout. The financial terrorists in London, New York, and Tel Aviv don’t care who loses as long as the Global Debt Slavery System (GDSS) keeps filling their bank accounts at the expense of humanity and the environment. As a curious aside, it is worth noting that the infamous Rothschilds dynasty is alleged to be a major player in uranium mining and the promotion of nuclear power, not to mention having their hands in much of the world’s wealth.¹⁰

Arnie Gunderson Reports

For the first time our top nuclear expert, the intrepid Arnie Gunderson, has publicly acknowledged that at least some of the destruction at Fukushima was caused by the earthquake, and not the tsunami as is so often reported by the mainstream media. This fact was first enumerated by Jake Adelstein and David McNeil in the Atlantic Wire.¹¹ Gunderson believes the core is still inside the No. 2 reactor and not causing a China Syndrome, and says it will be another five years before the Fukushima reactor cores cool down to the point where they can be dealt with.

The volume and insightfulness of his analysis is worth extensively reviewing. Despite my hearing from someone in the mainstream science community derisively refer to Arnie as an outlier, if I had the chance to buy Gunny a cup of coffee I surely would. While it would be better to have a wider array of experts who can speak in laymen’s terms in order to compare and contrast their views, most scientists are bought and paid for by their employers in the University and Military research world. I have not read of any serious refutation of Gunderson’s Fukushima analysis.

I’ve quoted and paraphrased the following points he made in two recent interviews¹²:

• “It’s pretty clear that unit one at Fukushima Daiichi was in trouble before the tsunami hit…. It was the first one to meltdown, the first one to explode, first one to run out of water. So, something happened in unit one before the tsunami hit, I don’t know what it is but obviously its seismically induced. So that throws a monkey wrench into the industry’s seismic analysis. These plants were designed to withstand the earthquake that hit that site… on land a 7.9. The plant was designed to withstand something that severe, and yet unit one failed and that should be a major concern.”
• “All of the people of the planet have a deep debt to the thousand or two thousand men who risked their lives” to tackle meltdowns at both Fukushima power stations No. 1 and No. 2. These brave men and women were exposed to high levels of radiation in order to prevent the situation from worsening, while Tepco and the government just stood by and downplayed the dangers.
• There are institutional problems in the nuclear industry to keep reactors that have safety issues running despite the dangers. “Tepco has actually created this problem by trying to minimize the problem” whereas in fact “this is a fifty year battle.” From now until 2062 it is “going to cost a lot of radiation exposure to workers” as well as a half a trillion dollars.
• The reactors will require five more years of “throwing water on them” until they physically cool down; cost to dismantle will be 15 billion dollars per reactor.
• In Unit 2 they were expecting to find water in the container at 5 meters but did not find “any water until until they got to 60 centimeters (2 feet)… in the bottom of the containment…. The core is in the bottom of the reactor and containment which definitely indicates a meltdown.” Tepco is pouring 5-10 tons of water per day into unit two but the water is disappearing out of the containment vessel and leaking into the other buildings. This is due to damage in the suppression pool from the explosion that occurred after the earthquake. Without the 5 meters of water for shielding “it will be very difficult to remove any nuclear fuel.” With such high radiation levels, over 70 sieverts per hour, electronic systems that control devices such as robots that could remove the fuel, are destroyed by the radiation.
• The unit 3 fuel pool is just as bad as unit 4 but because of radiation “no one has ever gotten near it yet…. The biggest problem that I see is the seismic risk because we’ve got fuel pools in Units 4 and 3 and 2 and 1 that are exposed to the atmosphere now and if there is a major seismic event — especially in Units 3 and 4 — if those fuel pools crack, we… risk destroying the nation of Japan.”
• Gunderson measured noble gases from Fukushima three times greater than Chernobyl; he is unsure of cesium but it is definitely higher than government estimate of 4 petabecquerals and may be up to three times higher than Chernobyl.
• 78% of the radiation from Fukushima “wound up in the Pacific Ocean” and the rest on Japan; biomagnification of seafood will lead to radioactive salmon and tuna in a few years; 2% of Fukushima radiation went to North America, namely the American and Canadian Cascade Range on the West Coast.
• 7,000 becquerals per sq kg of soil from Tokyo was measured in five samples by Gunderson. This exceeds 5,000 which is Japan’s limit for agriculture. However, “a lot of the land crops over time will gradually decrease in concentration [of radioactivity].”
• Japanese are treating radioactive waste by diluting it with clean waste, thereby sweeping the problem under the rug as if the radioactivity is not significant. What would be treated like radioactive waste in the US is being diluted and treated as normal waste in Japan, and being spread all over the country for incineration. This practice may lead to biomagnification in the food supply–wild “rabbits are already radioactive! … The Japanese ‘solution’ is to raise the radioactive standard so high that the standard is effectively meaningless.”

What Goes Around Comes Around

In Japan there is a media blackout on the topic of burning the 25 million tons of radioactive debris from the northeast tsunami zone.¹³ I’ll bet if you walked around Tokyo and asked people whether they thought the debris should be burned in public facilities, and that the government does not publish data on effluent toxicity, they would not agree to the policy. But since most people “know nothing” it is no problem. People no longer read newspapers and TV news is superficial, not to mention that most people don’t watch the news because it’s considered too “boring.”

However, Japan’s decision to ship radioactive debris around the country in order to share the burden of the disaster has met with some resistance. In Kyoto there have been vocal protests against receiving the debris. Maybe lack of data on effluent contamination explains why the government does not want to tell residents whether they will burn debris or not.¹⁴ I put the question to Iori Mochizuki of the Fukushima Diary:

Q: How can we find out about the effluent from chimneys that will occur from burning of radioactive waste?

A: “That’s now everyone’s question. MEXT says they can filter it out 100% but there is no data, even no official [data]. Only insiders of those filter makers [have leaked information that] the filters don’t work at all. Now we are all trying to find out the source.”¹⁵

In other words, although the government reassures the public that no radioactive effluents will escape incinerator chimneys, there is no data published to verify this. Rumors that the filters do not block radiation add to doubts. Even if the filters do block most of the radiation, considering the huge tonnage being burned, the amount of radiation will add up. The apparent fact that there is no published data is a logical fallacy that proves either the government is lying or that they deem the citizenry to be little more than troublesome cockroaches.

In the past Junichi Sato of Greenpeace Japan told me that incinerators were 90% more efficient than older models in blocking toxic effluents.¹⁶ But even this means there is a ten percent margin of error on effluents that can escape, relative to less efficient incinerators. I assume the government feels this is such a small amount that it is nothing to worry about, but given municipal incinerators were built for household waste and not radioactive debris, it is worrying.

When I called the Greenpeace Japan office they referred me to their website, but I could not find any stories on the incinerator issue. I asked the person over the phone about it, and they said that while they don’t entirely trust the government they have no plans to monitor the incinerators. I sent an email with questions on this matter but have not yet received a response.

1. Mar 2012 Iwate-ken Oki M6.4; 30 Mar 2012 Fukushima-ken Oki Magnitude 5.0 Intensity: 3; Magnitude 5.8 – EASTERN HONSHU, JAPAN 2012 April 01; Japan Meteorological Agency’s Highly Unusual Storm Warning on TV: “Don’t Go Outside.”
2. The Fukushima Lie.
3. Fukushima…radiation so high – even robots not safe and Japan Nuclear Plant May Be Worse Off Than Thought.
4. Fukushima live camera moved.
5. How Much Fuel Is at Risk at Fukushima?
6. In light of further nuclear risks, economic growth should not be priority.
7. Russia Today: Gundersen: One Year Anniversary of Fukushima Daiichi.
8. Fukushima-derived radionuclides in the ocean and biota off Japan; Scientists: Far more cesium released than previously believed; Chernobyl: Assessment of Radiological and Health Impact — 2002 Update of Chernobyl: Ten Years On.
9. Chernobyl: Assessment of Radiological and Health Impact — 2002 Update of Chernobyl: Ten Years On.
10. Reasons why the Rothschild Controlled Governments and Media Lie about the Japanese Nuke Crisis; Rothschild Bank International, Leading the Push for “New Nuclear”; Rothschild World Domination Plan Via Private Nuclear Weapons; How the Rothschild Dynasty Operates.
11. Meltdown: What Really Happened at Fukushima?
12. Interview: Arnie Gunderson, Nuclear Engineer and Podcast with Arnie Gunderson
13. Tokyo Starts to Burn Onagawa Debris in Earnest at Incineration Plants for Regular Household Garbage in 23 Special Wards and Disaster Debris Is Radioactive, Ministry of the Environment’s Own Data Shows.
14. Intense protest against sharing radioactive debris policy in Kyoto and Governor of Kyoto on Disaster Debris: “We May Not Tell Residents.”
15. 50,000 tones of radioactive wastes are over 8000 Bq/Kg.
16. The Ecology of Hope.

Reactor Unit No. Four

While it is true that we live in interesting times, they are perhaps, a bit too interesting. As I recently scanned the nuclear news, one item jumped out. Japan came “this close” to a large scale nuclear catastrophe, but was saved only by Tokyo Power Company’s (Tepco) mechanical mishap — not by their diligence!

The Asahi newspaper reported that at the time of the March 2011 earthquake/tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear reactors:

A decrease in the water level [at unit four] could have caused exposure and overheating of the nuclear fuel and a massive discharge of radiation and radioactive substances. That would not only have made the entire Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant inaccessible, but also could have led to the abandonment of the Fukushima No. 2 plant and other nuclear power plants located nearby. Worst-case scenarios envisaged by the governments in Tokyo and Washington involved the evacuation of residents from the Tokyo metropolitan area. In reality, however, a displaced separator gate between the spent fuel storage pool and the adjoining reactor well apparently created an opening, allowing about 1,000 tons of water to flow from the reactor well into the storage pool, it was learned later. The injection of outside water into the storage pool began on March 20. As a result, the fuel in the [unit four] pool was kept at relatively safe levels during the crisis.

It is unclear to me why the fuel rods would not have been covered in water the entire time given they can never be exposed to air, but according to this account it was only by accident that water dribbled in due to the malfunctioning gate from the reactor well. Had the fuel rods not been cooled it would have caused a radiological fire and prevented water from being sprayed onto the other reactors. Waterless meltdowns at several reactors would have led to a chain reaction of events, which would have made Chernobyl seem like a tea party by comparison. In fact, the 3/11 earthquake led to a total of 14 reactors at 4 sites in Japan being directly affected.

Such a malfunction is not unusual for the nuclear industry, which excels in keystone cops antics, and worse, lying to regulators. In order to save money for Tepco, an engineer admitted he covered up “a manufacturing defect in the $250 million steel vessel installed at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 4 reactor… for a unit of Hitachi Ltd. (6501) in 1974. The reactor, which Tanaka has called a ‘time bomb,’ was shut for maintenance when the March 11 earthquake” hit. Tanaka noted about 3/11, “[w]ho knows what would have happened if that reactor had been running?” The technical problems prevented the restart of the defective unit four reactor which could have led to a full scale meltdown.

The “what if” scenarios are not behind us — despite what the International Nuclear Crime Syndicate (INCS) says, the crisis is far from over. As Japanese nuclear expert and critic Hiroaki Koide stated, it would not even take a large earthquake to cause havoc at unit four. Due to the weakened structure of the building and because of persistent earthquakes, the 1300-1500 nuclear fuel rods which are stored in an upper floor, 100 feet above ground, are in a precarious position.

If a large aftershock occurred and the wall here collapsed, the water in the pool would leak out and the spent fuel would not be cooled any more. Then, they would start to melt, probably completely. And the huge amount of radiation contained in the spent fuel would be released outside, with no walls to block it… that would be the end. The end for a wide area including Tokyo.

Koide’s fears are echoed by Yukitero Naka, a nuclear engineer featured in a German TV broadcast. Naka’s nuclear consulting company has been working to help fix the Fukushima No. 1 station, so he has intimate knowledge of the situation. “My biggest fear is that we soon won’t have any qualified staff who can work” at the site once most of them reach maximum radiation exposure. He is unsure where new engineers and workers will come from, and given that it will take decades to decommission the plant, this is an extremely worrisome point. He also believes the situation is still dangerous, especially unit four, “which has been strongly damaged by the earthquake.” The spent fuel rods in the cooling pool are stored along with “a lot of very, very heavy machinery…. If another earthquake occurs then the building could collapse and another chain reaction could very likely occur.”

Hideki Shimamura and his team of Tokyo University geologists told German TV that the chances of “a new big earthquake” in Japan are 75% in the next four years. If you look at a topographical map which shows the ocean depths, there is a giant trench that parallels the east coast of Japan, as if the entire country was about to fall off a ledge. Aftershocks in the northeast of Japan have been common since the 3/11 quake and Japan is one of the world’s most seismically active regions on the Asian Pacific Rim of Fire.¹ ,² ,³

The “Stop Hamaoka” website has been up for years to warn of the “big one” which could affect the Hamaoka nuclear station situated 200 km from Tokyo. They report that 66% of winds blow to the Tokyo Metropolitan area from Hamaoka throughout year. Crucially, Shimamura believes Japan has drastically underestimated the power of earthquakes in their building standards and nuclear plants are vastly under prepared for the magnitude of large quakes, having based their projections on now outdated and debunked data. In essence, it is impossible to build nuclear power plants to withstand major earthquakes. When the German TV reporters put this question to the Tepco managers, they admitted that while they are doing all they can to shore up the unit four building structure (which adds some comfort), they were basically dumbfounded. Given they are operating on an outdated paradigm, who can blame them?

US nuclear expert Robert Alvarez notes that if water drains from the unit four “pool resulting from another quake [it] could trigger a catastrophic radiological fire involving about eight times more radioactive cesium than was released at Chernobyl.”

In one of the most informative interviews given by now legendary nuclear expert, Arnie Gunderson, on June 5, 2011, he described the situation at unit four:

[T]here is no reactor running there. Everything has been taken out and it was put in the spent fuel pool. But that means there is no containment either, so the entire spent fuel pool is visible literally. When they have those helicopter fly-overs, you can look down into this blown out shell of a building and see the fuel in the spent fuel pool. It’s still relatively hot, because it only shut down in November. So there is still a lot of decay heat in that pool. Brookhaven National Labs did a study in 1997 and it said that if a fuel pool went dry and caught on fire, it could cause a hundred and eighty-seven thousand fatalities… The Chairman of the NRC said that the reason he told Americans to get out from fifty miles out was that he was afraid that Unit 4 would catch fire, that exposed fuel pool would volatilize plutonium, uranium, cesium, and strontium. And if the Brookhaven Study is to be believed could kill more than a hundred thousand people, as a result… my advice to friends [in Tokyo is] that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed.

Unfortunately the technology to safely remove the rods has not been invented. Because of extreme levels of radiation, workers can’t do the job, so we will first have to invent the robots to save the humans. The government has begun the process to decommission the wreckage at Fukushima. “Toshiba, Hitachi GE nuclear energy and Mitsubishi heavy industries are already supported by the government to develop the decommissioning technology” but are seeking help from smaller technology related companies. Mr. Koide is worried because the operation to remove fuel rods will not begin until December of 2013.

Gundersen remarked about the difficulty of the situation:

Unit 4 has me stumped. I think they will be forced to build a building around the building and then, because you need heavy lifting cranes – cranes that lift a hundred and fifty tons, which are massive cranes, to put the nuclear fuel into canisters, which then can get removed. That is sort of what happened at TMI, but all of the fuel at TMI was still at the bottom of the vessel. But it was a three-year process to get the molten fuel out of Three Mile Island – four years actually. So the problem here is that all of the cranes that do that have been destroyed, at least on units 1, 3, and 4. And you can’t do it in the air. It has to be done under water. So my guess is that they will have to build a building around the building to provide enough shielding and water, so that they can then go in and put this fuel into a heavy lift canister.

The present state of the other reactors is not so rosy either, recently unit two was found to be Hotter Than Hell and lacking proper water for cooling the 73 sievert corium glob. Units one and three are so radioactive there is no way to even assess their conditions with present monitoring technology. Technical problems and leakages of highly radioactive water constantly plague the disaster site.⁴ ,⁵ The logistical problems described by Naka and Gunderson are just mind boggling, why isn’t there an all-out international effort underway to save Japan and the world?

Present Extent of Radiation

Assuming the worst doesn’t happen, the situation is bad enough. We already know that Japan was lucky because most of the radiation from the accident blew out to sea (not lucky for whales), but that which did not has left a cesium-blanketed ecosystem throughout the Northeast and Tokyo regions. The amount of radiation released has constantly been revised upward with estimates of cesium now reaching as high as 50 percent of Chernobyl. A European researcher speculates that:

the accident could easily have had a much more devastating impact on the people of Tokyo. In the first days after the accident the wind was blowing out to sea, but on the afternoon of 14 March it turned back towards shore, bringing clouds of radioactive caesium-137 over a huge swathe of the country (see ‘Radioisotope reconstruction’). Where precipitation fell, along the country’s central mountain ranges and to the northwest of the plant, higher levels of radioactivity were later recorded in the soil; thankfully, the capital and other densely populated areas had dry weather. ‘There was a period when quite a high concentration went over Tokyo, but it didn’t rain,’ says Stohl. ‘It could have been much worse.’

But acting in typically secretive and arrogant fashion Japan’s political oligarchs and bureaucrats decided not to tell people about the radiation dangers:

The science minister and other top ministry officials decided to withhold radiation forecast data from the public four days after the March 11 earthquake… lawmakers serving as top ministry officials and top bureaucrats made the decision on March 15 to withhold data about the predicted spread of radioactivity, which included an assumption that all radioactive material would be discharged from the crippled plant.

Furthermore, important emails warning of the spread of radiation were “accidentally” deleted from government computers in order to cover their own tracks. Thanks to the spread of radiation, even the nastiest of all radio nuclides, plutonium, has been detected 20-30 kilometers northwest and south of the nuclear disaster site.

I have conducted random surveys with my own gamma radiation dosimeter. A normal baseline reading is between 0.05 microsieverts per hour (mcs pr hr) up to about 0.1 mcs pr hr. I assume it is measuring background gamma radiation fairly accurately because when I turned it on during an air flight at 30,000 feet it measured 2 mcs pr hr, which is normal for that altitude. I compared readings a meter above the ground in the US and Tokyo and they were the same, roughly 0.08.

The Japanese Ministry of Science and Technology (MEXT) measures radioactive fallout and water supplies. Airborne radiation is monitored from one or more building tops in central Tokyo. The chart for Tokyo and other regions generally reads a very low amount such as 0.05 mcs pr hr. However, when I measure from a building many meters above ground the reading is usually 0.1-1.3 mcs pr hr. I can’t account for the discrepancy except that different dosimeters measure different amounts. However, local officials in Tokyo took measurements at 5 cm above the ground at school yards and found only 0.1 mcs pr hr. This is odd because if you put the instrument on the ground, you sometimes get higher readings. In one park I measured 0.08 at 5 cm above but 0.15 when placed on the ground. At other locations on soil, sidewalks and gutters I have gotten on the ground readings ranging from 0.06 mcs pr hr up to 0.29. That’s quite a range. The local authorities did not even measure the school ground soil for radiation and there was no pressure from parents to look for it. Perhaps the government does not want to “needlessly” spend money even if children are playing on radioactive playgrounds. When Arnie Gunderson took five random soil samples around Tokyo he found them to be considered “radioactive waste” by US standards. Last year, the Radiation Defense Project published disturbing data of soil samples from the Tokyo region. Kashiwa City and Eastern Tokyo showed noticeable amounts of cesium with some extreme cases exceeding government limits for agriculture of 5,000 bq/kg.⁶

The government seems to be slowly improving their monitoring of the situation. MEXT recently published data showing considerable fallout of cesium and other nuclides over the Tokyo region. Presumably the fallout is from dust stirred up in Fukushima and not extensively from the nuclear site (although it is still emitting radiation). For example, in January of 2012 the fallout rate was 2 becquerals per sq meter of deposition on the ground in Tokyo, a total of 20 million bqs. The “silver lining in the uranium cloud” is that west of Tokyo there was very little radiation detected and food grown in those regions can be considered safer.

Human Health Impact

The Japanese government’s big lie that the nuclear disaster did “not pose an immediate health risk” after the reactor explosions should tell that to the 573 people who have now died because of the accident. Thanks mainly to independent media on the internet and a few honest newspaper reporters, we now know the full extent of the damage to the reactors and the spread of radioactivity, even though the government knew fully well at the time. No wonder “[o]ver half of Fukushima residents [are] ‘greatly worried‘ ” about their health due to the accident. A recent study by the French nuclear watchdog, ACRO, found “[w]hile the radioactive cesium levels in children in Tokyo, Kanagawa and Saitama were below detection levels, children in Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate and Chiba (Kashiwa City) were found with radioactive cesium in their urine.” ACRO’s website has published many results of tests conducted for radiation in Japan. As expected, house dust in the northeast has been found to be “contaminated with high levels” of cesium. In Chiba high levels of radioactive house dust were also found whereas in Osaka it was absent. In one prominent Tokyo school system it was found that for every time tested, the school detected low levels of cesium in the children’s milk supply. As people gain greater awareness of affected food they are avoiding purchasing food from Fukushima, thereby relegating Japan’s Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country, to destitution for its farmers.

For people worried about ingesting radio nuclides, here is a short list of detox methods suggested to me by a naturopath and a chemist:

Cesium and radio nuclide detox
Consumable:
kelp
Activated charcoal
French green clay
non oxidated magnesium
Baths:
magnesium salt baths
bentonite clay baths

Estimates on the number of deaths to occur due to the Fukushima nuclear disaster vary from nil, according to the official apologists, into the millions.

I attended a lecture by Dr. Chris Busby in Tokyo during the summer of 2011. As an expert on the effects of low level radiation, he explained his methodology and criticized the nuclear establishment’s risk model as being inherently flawed for undercounting dangers. Just after the accident he wrote a paper in which he estimated:

[W]ithin 100 km of Fukushima Daiichi, approximately 200,000 excess cancers will occur within the next 50 years with about half of them diagnosed in the next 10 years, if the 3.3 million people in the area remain there for one year. He estimates over 220,000 excess cancers in the 7.9 million people from 100 to 200 km in the next 50 years, also with about half of them to be diagnosed in the next 10 years.

Given that the paper was written based on the original Japanese government estimates of radiation–which are now understood to be much higher–we could double the number from four to eight hundred thousand premature deaths. If we include areas outside the 200 km radius the number could go even higher.

I made a simple and very rough calculation of my own based on US safety guidelines for external radiation for nuclear workers. In my calculations I have tried to err on the side of possibility of danger rather than downplaying it. For example, if we assume that one in twenty, not one in a hundred, young girls will get cancer in the next twenty years in Fukushima due to external gamma radiation, we can extrapolate that model to other age groups and locations. According to Wikipedia, as of 2010, Fukushima prefecture had a population of 2,028,752. Assuming that Japan is an aging society and especially that countryside regions have older populations, I figured no more than one sixth of that number would be young girls. If we assume the chances are half as much for boys of the same age, then one in forty will get cancer. The total would be:

girls = 16,000
boys = 8,000
all adults = 24,000
total = 48,000

I randomly doubled the number for adults considering they would be a majority of the population though less vulnerable according to US guidelines. Other prefectures surrounding Fukushima have similar population levels, until you get to Chiba and Tokyo where there are many millions. If we use 48,000 for nine prefectures including Tokyo, the total amounts to 432,000 premature deaths, a number similar to or lower than other estimates.

However, this model depends on a set amount of radiation and eventual evacuation from dangerous areas–yet Fukushima is still emitting radiation; it does not assess risk from internal radiation from ingesting contaminated dust or food; or include other diseases or damage to DNA to future generations.

Another calculation would be to compare with Chernobyl. If we assume a million died from Chernobyl, but fifty percent of cesium from Fukushima, with about 20 percent of that landing on the land mass of Japan, but assume triple population density for Japan, the number may be around 300,000 deaths in Japan in the next 25 years.

A Culture of Corruption and Denial

By any reckoning, the handling of the nuclear crisis has shown the international nuclear establishment and the government of Japan to be unreliable at best and totally dishonest at worst. One of the latest scandals that puts profits over people is the determination to send radioactive debris all across Japan to be burned in incinerators. Instead of containing the problem to the already affected area, radioactive effluents and fly-ash will be spread to landfills as far away as Okinawa. The Ex-SKF blogger neatly sums up the economic reasons why local governments (in disregard to the wishes of local populations) are in favor of importing the debris:

The incinerators, if they are state-of-the-art, need more garbage even to operate, so the disaster debris is god-sent; The incinerators, if not state-of-the-art, badly need upgrading or even building new ones (or so they say), and by saying yes to the debris the municipalities will get the subsidy from the national government for the upgrade or building new ones..

Back in 2003, Junichi Sato of Greenpeace Japan told me that “[t]he waste incineration industry has a vested interest in the production and destruction of waste.” While the government claims that the latest generation of incinerators being built release safe levels of effluents (90% reduction in emissions compared to previous technology), they do not address the issue of dioxin in the highly toxic fly ash which must be buried in land fills.

The government is allowing fly waste to be recycled into building materials. This may prove dangerous to human dwellers living in close proximity to such toxic materials. Furthermore, this propagates the illusion of recycling as a solution to the waste problem…. Incineration technology is energy intensive, expensive to build and operate. Instead of waste incineration, we need to revive local community involvement in resource consumption decisions and move toward greater reuse of materials as opposed to short term recycling or waste production. But the government is promoting waste production and incineration by having municipalities sign 20 year contracts with incinerator companies. The contracts specify that a certain amount of waste must be delivered on an agreed upon time schedule [which] encourages profligacy. (p. 125-133).

This aspect of the nuclear crisis is rooted in Japan’s “Dokken Kokka” or “Construction State,” which has relied on pork barrel spending to build construction projects over the last twenty years in order to spur the economy. An example of what happens to politicians who object too strongly is the case of Diet member, Koki Ishii. Ishii spent ten years investigating Japan’s exploding public debt which was caused by misuse of tax money and shady government ties between the construction industry and organized crime. Ishii ended up being only the second Diet member to be assassinated since WWII– murdered by the “Construction State.” The links between universities and organized crime have lead to intimidation of young social activists questioning destructive social policies as well.⁷ This helps explain why the Japanese public has not stood up to the Nuclear Industry, youth are discouraged from getting involved in public policy. When I wrote a modest paper on the Fukushima nuclear crisis for an insignificant, small college journal, the article was rejected as it was deemed “too sensitive.” This is not surprising considering the function of institutions of higher education are to reinforce existing power structures, not to question established (no matter how fraudulent) practices and social norms. TV mind control and institutional oppression help may help to explain why some victims directly affected by the Fukushima disaster still support nuclear power. But many Japanese are standing up to the Nuclear Bullies. Righteous and angered citizens have questioned Osaka’s decision to restart reactors in disregard of public opinion.

One of the freshest voices from Japan has been Mr. Mochizuki of the Fukushima Diary website, who has supplied us with voluminous raw data translated from Japanese sources into English. In recent essays Mochizuki emphasized the following important points: there is a growing sense of helplessness among Japanese who are worried about radiation but are unable to muster the will to evacuate; the psychology of unspoken social pressure has much to do with their unwillingness to face the reality of the Fukushima disaster; although laudable, civic action in Japan has not impacted energy policies in a substantive way and this is leading to desperation and even the potential for violence.⁸ ,⁹ ,¹⁰

People have been programmed from birth to be cogs in the industrial machine. Japan ran very smoothly for quite some time with remarkable technological and economic success. But with that system disrupted the programmed populace has no way to reconfigure, so they just keep going on, pretending reality does not exist, or that radio nuclides won’t harm them. The public reeducation process that rare individuals like Mochizuki is undertaking is very courageous and noble.

Some scientists have suggested that geothermal energy is the way to go in volcanic Japan. “In addition to its ample geothermal resources, Japan has abundant wind, tide and solar resources.” But there is uncertainty over Japan’s economic future as nuclear reactors are shut down and expensive oil imports are increased. Some observers are worried that Japan might enter a severe recession before renewables are able to come up to speed.

American commentator Pat Buchanan points to a deeper issue for Japan, the demographics crisis:

How did this come about? The means are not in dispute. When millions of Japanese soldiers returned from their dead empire to start families, there was a population explosion. Under the U.S. occupation, Tokyo swiftly legalized abortion, and the nation embraced birth control. Japan did so before Europe, but Europe followed. Now all face demographic death, with Japan leading the way.

In recent months I have taken solace in listening to the lectures of Matt Johnson of the Orthodox Nationalist. His conservative philosophy of the simple and moral life based on agrarianism is a breath of fresh air amidst the vapidness of middle class values. The notion of the bourgeoisie as the “universal instrument of global destruction” propounded by great minds from past centuries is as relevant today with the Fukushima disaster, and the many other environmental armageddon’s that humanity faces, as ever.

1. Seismic Monitor Map.
2. Earthquake Information
   20:07 JST 27 Mar 2012 20:00 JST 27 Mar 2012 Iwate-ken Oki M6.4
3. Japan earthquakes 2011 Visualization map.
4. Japan reactor has fatally high radiation, no water .
5. Leak from the Pipe after Reverse Osmosis (Desalination) Treatment: 120 Tonnes, 80 Liters May Have Flowed into Ocean.
6. Tokyo Metropolitan Soil Testing Results. Chart.
7. Rumpus on campus: Prestigious university in Tokyo has become a battleground in a war over freedom of political expression.
8. Japanese politely giving up their lives.
9. Separated Japanese.
10. Japanese pushed to the corner to revolt.

As Israel, the United States and their NATO allies set their sights on the “prize,” Iran’s vast petrochemical wealth, multiple themes have been floated by corporate media to make the case for war.

Since the 1980s, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and now, according to the Treasury Department, Iran’s alleged links to global narcotrafficking networks have all been evoked as clarion calls for “regime change.” It would serve us well however, to explore the recent history of the secret state’s reliance upon the illicit trade and how such dalliances advance America’s wider geopolitical goals.

Contras and Kosovars: CIA Shadow Wars

In the 1980s, it was the Sandinistas and “Castro-Communism” who did nicely for the Reagan administration. As money and weapons flowed to “our boys,” the Contras, they repaid the favor by massacring Nicaraguans by the tens of thousands for Uncle Sam while generously providing cocaine by the ton, to party-happy Americans during that “go-go” decade.

Indeed, when Colombian drug lords Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar began their profitable partnership, they did so alongside dope-dealing Bolivian fascists and Argentine neo-Nazi generals with long-standing ties to the CIA. As Consortium News revealed: “The putsch, which became known as the Cocaine Coup, installed [Luis] García Meza and other drug-connected military officers who promptly turned Bolivia into South America’s first modern narco-state. The secure supply of Bolivian cocaine was important to the development of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s.”

In fact, it was Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suárez Goméz who financed the coup. With close ties to Pinochet’s regime in Chile and Argentina’s death squad generals, Suárez was a fixture amongst far-right international circles who generously distributed funds to South American affiliates of the Nazi-tainted World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

When WACL was founded in 1966 in Taipei as the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), it first functioned as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the governments of Taiwan under dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist narcocracy and the Republic of Korea, then under the iron rule of American ally, Park Chung Hee.

Amongst other notable members who founded WACL were Yoshio Kodama and Ryiochi Sasakawa, Class-A Japanese war criminals and fascists who were top leaders of post-war yakuza crime syndicates. Both men were billionaires who’s wealth derived from control over Asian drug, gambling and prostitution rackets. Imprisoned in 1945 for war crimes Sasakawa, along with Kodama and future Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, was saved from the gallows and released from prison in 1948, a result of his OSS-CIA connections. He once proudly stated: “I am the world’s richest fascist.” Both Kodama and Sasakawa operated alongside old “China hands” such as Paul Helliwell, who created CIA front companies linked to the drug traffic, Bangkok-based Sea Supply Corporation and the Taiwanese airline Civil Air Transport.

Indeed, it was none other than Sasakawa, the power behind the throne of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, who provided major funding for Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s intelligence-connected Unification Church, and WACL, key actors in Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup, facts you’re not likely to read in the Moon-owned Washington Times.

As analyst Peter Dale Scott wrote for Variant magazine, “In the post-war years, when the drug-financed China Lobby was strong in Washington, and the U.S. shipped arms and Chinese Nationalist troops into eastern Burma, opium production in that remote region increased almost five-fold in fifteen years, from less than 80 to 300-400 tons a year. Production doubled again in the 1960s, the heyday of the Kuomintang-CIA alliance in Southeast Asia.” In his most recent book, Scott noted:

The members of Helliwell’s small OSS detachment in Kunming (Helliwell, [E. Howard] Hunt, Ray Cline, Lucien Conein, and Mitchell WerBell) cast a long shadow over both postwar intelligence-drug triarchies and the WACL’s history. In addition to Helliwell’s support for KMT drug traffickers in Burma and Hunt’s contribution in Mexico, APACL’s formation is said to have owed a large debt to Ray Cline. In the late 1970s John Singlaub, another veteran of Kunming, took over the WACL. Lucien Conein became a case officer of the Vietnamese officials overseeing anticommunist drug networks, first Ngo Dinh Nhu and later police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Mitchell WerBell, who went on to develop small arms for intelligence services like the [Mexican] DFS, was also involved with WACL death squad patrons … and was eventually indicted himself on drug charges. (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, pp. 52-53)

Shortly after WACL’s formation, the organization was joined by representatives of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an unsavory cabal of war criminals and Nazi collaborators led by Yaroslav Stetsko. When German armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stetsko, then the leader of the collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists proclaimed the founding of a Ukrainian quisling state allied with the Third Reich. In the “Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” Stetsko declared that Ukraine “will closely cooperate with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world.” After the war, Stetsko and his cohorts fled Europe along the Vatican’s infamous “ratlines” and took up the anticommunist cudgel for the United States while working alongside European and Latin American fascists connected to global drug networks.

As the corrupt García Meza regime consolidated power, they butchered leftists, peasants and union organizers and were assisted by Argentine “dirty war” specialists, CIA asset and escaped Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie and a motley crew of far-right terrorists. It was a thoroughly international affair. Fresh from fomenting bloodshed in Italy, Stefano Delle Chiaie, the architect of the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing which killed 85, a hard core Nazi with operational links to both the CIA and NATO’s Gladio network, put his unique “skills” to use building up the global drug trade and exporting terror into Central America. As left-wing researcher Stuart Christie documented:

One of the Delle Chiaie organisers in Latin America, West German Joachim Fiebelkorn (born 1947), a Paladin and Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten veteran, as well as a Frankfurt pimp, who had worked with Delle Chiaie in Bolivia, stated later to the West German police that Delle Chiaie was the number one international middleman between the Sicilian Mafia and the Latin American cocaine producers. Based in a police barracks next to the West German Embassy in the capital, La Paz, the Delle Chiaie men, Los Novios de la Muerte–’The Fiancés of Death’–as they called themselves, were contracted as security guards and enforcers for the multinational drug empire of Roberto Suárez, described as the ‘King of Coca,’ overseeing the production, transportation, distribution and marketing of cocaine. (Stuart Christie, Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, London, Anarchy Magazine/Refract Publications, 1984)

Investigative journalists Marta Gurvich and Robert Parry reported that “many of the Argentine intelligence officers who assisted in the Cocaine Coup followed up their victory in Bolivia by moving northward into Central America to train a ragtag force of Nicaraguan contras.” By “1981,” Gurvich and Parry wrote, “President Reagan formally authorized the CIA to collaborate with the Argentine intelligence services in building up the contra army.”

Under the stewardship of CIA Director William Casey, the Company did more than just watch from the sidelines. With a wink-and-a-nod from the Reagan White House, they concluded that the Medellín Cartel, as they had earlier with Asian drug mafias, could be used to help defeat communism in Latin America. Together with the far-larger Cali Cartel, run by the enterprising Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, they did just that. It was estimated at the time that the CIA’s underworld “friends” made up to $60 million per month; chump change by today’s standards, but with the Sandinistas out of power by 1990, relations with Pablo Escobar soured.

In fact, as the National Security Archive revealed in previously classified documents, when Escobar was run to ground “key evidence” linked “the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down [the] fugitive … to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.” According to the Archive, “The affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S. intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narcotraffickers every bit as dangerous as Escobar himself.” They had; a pattern that persists today as can readily be seen in the U.S. “war” against Mexico’s powerful Cartels.

As we now know, this great drug war “victory” in practice favored one corrupt Colombian faction over another with no discernible effects on the ground. Indeed, as Narco News reported, a leaked classified document written by Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent “claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs.”

“Kent’s memorandum,” journalist Bill Conroy disclosed, “contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”

“The memo further claims that, rather than being simply a few ‘bad apples’ who need to be reported to their superiors, these allegedly dirty agents are being protected by an ongoing cover-up orchestrated by ‘watchdog’ agencies within the Justice Department,” Conroy wrote.

This was hardly an aberration but rather, emblematic of the corrupt nature of official U.S. policies going back decades. As we learned in the late 1990s, largely as a result of public outrage generated by the late Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series, a secret Memorandum of Understanding between Reagan’s Justice Department and the Agency came to light. That 1982 memo legally freed the CIA from reporting drug smuggling and other crimes committed by their assets; a point to keep in mind when we explore U.S. allegations of corruption by top Iranian officials below.

Were these Cold War anomalies? Hardly.

When the “Great Triangulator” Bill Clinton took the helm in 1993, it was Slobodan Milošević who reprised the role of the century as Europe’s “new Hitler.” With the Cold War over, the Soviet “menace” a fleeting image in the rearview mirror, and with neoliberal economic “reforms” all the rage, America began its eastward expansion of NATO into the former Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia, deemed an historical anachronism had to go, and so it did.

Never mind that before occupying the Oval Office, when he was governor of Arkansas Clinton deep-sixed investigations into illicit operations by legendary CIA drug pilot and DEA snitch Barry Seal. Indeed, Seal and his cohorts, as well-documented, flew vast quantities of drugs into Mena Airport for the Medellín Cartel in “protected” drug operations that helped fund the Nicaraguan Contras, as investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker reported for The Washington Weekly back in 1997.

Recapitulating a modus operandi which the secret state has relied upon since the end of World War Two, first in Asia and then globally, far-right political and religious extremists and drug trafficking organizations with ties to Western intelligence began working their magic in the Balkans.

Across the Atlantic, while the media obsessed over stains on Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was in full-swing. America and Germany’s close allies, the secessionist Bosnian government under Alija Izetbegović, a darling of Western “humanitarian interventionists,” an Islamist fraudster who had expressed sympathies for the 13th Waffen SS Handschar Division during the war, which earned him a stint in a Yugoslav prison, provided thousands of veteran Afghan-Arab fighters passports and guns to help “liberate” Bosnia. As with NATO’s current “regime change” ops in Libya and Syria, Salafist jihadis aligned with a CIA shadow army which morphed into Al Qaeda, the “database,” poured into the region.

While Osama Bin Laden’s minions wrecked havoc in Bosnia, merrily butchering Jews, Roma and Serbs whilst establishing Saudi-financed Wahhabist “charities,” later in the decade they gained entrée into Kosovo where they joined NATO’s newest “best friends forever,” the Kosovo Liberation Army. Ruled with iron fists by gangsters Hashim Thaçi, Agim Çeku and Ramush Haradinaj, the KLA, aligned with Italian Mafiosi and Turkish crime bosses and ran highly-profitable heroin and prostitution rackets across Europe.

In 1999, The Montreal Gazette published an exposé reporting that “Kosovar Albanian rebels were linked to drugs by narcotics experts in Europe as early as 1994, while U.S. authorities warned in 1996 that Kosovars were smuggling large amounts of weapons and drugs. Police in various Western nations also noted the rising proportion of heroin being shipped to their countries through the Balkans, and the rise in crime and overdose deaths that accompanied the drug.”

Michael Levine, a 25-year DEA veteran and whistleblower who currently co-hosts The Expert Witness Radio Show, told the Gazette there was “no question” that American secret state agencies knew about the KLA’s drug ties.

“They (the CIA) protected them (the KLA) in every way they could,” Levine said. “As long as the CIA is protecting the KLA, you’ve got major drug pipelines protected from any police investigation.”

Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported that “While KLA leaders were shaking hands with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at Rambouillet, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was ‘preparing a report for European interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs’.”

“In order to thrive,” Chossudovsky averred, “the criminal syndicates involved in the Balkans narcotics trade need friends in high places. Smuggling rings with alleged links to the Turkish State are said to control the trafficking of heroin through the Balkans ‘cooperating closely with other groups with which they have political or religious ties’ including criminal groups in Albanian and Kosovo. In this new global financial environment, powerful undercover political lobbies connected to organized crime cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment.”

Following NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign, a template for today’s State Department-fomented “humanitarian interventions,” the former socialist Yugoslavia lay in ruins, the KLA had their narco-state and the Pentagon had Camp Bondsteel. By 2000, Thaçi’s “boys” had pushed aside Turkish and Italian mobsters and took control of the lucrative Balkan heroin pipeline and harvested human organs for sale on the international black market.

It was a victory all around.

We should keep Chossudovsky’s point in mind today, as “undercover political lobbies” such as the terrorist Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK) and their various fronts such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) “cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment,” showering U.S. politicians and military elites with millions of dollars in “speaking fees” from unknown sources as The Christian Science Monitor exposed.

The New ‘Heroin Connection’

If the prospect of a “nuclear-armed” Iran isn’t enough to send red-blooded, God fearin’ Americans into a tizzy, then consider this zinger from RFE/RL: “U.S. Says Iranian General Instrumental In Afghan Drug Traffic.”

That’s right, the CIA’s former propaganda mouthpiece Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, smelling blood in the water and itching for a fight, informed us last week that the Obama administration “has named a general in Iran’s elite Al-Quds force as a key figure in trafficking heroin from Afghanistan.”

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, “General General Gholamreza Baghbani, who runs the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force office in Zahedan,” has been designated a “narcotics kingpin.”

We’re told that Baghbani has been accused “of aiding Afghan drug runners in moving opiates into and through Iran, as well helping send weapons to the Taliban.”

Guns in, drugs out; while it has a familiar ring to it, are we talking about Iran or NATO’s Central Asian outpost, Afghanistan?

According to a 1998 timeline inserted into the Congressional Record during the mark-up for the 1999 Intelligence Authorization Act we read the following:

Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production, triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally raised opium for export. The CIA-supported rebel Mujahedeen begins expanding production to finance their insurgency. Between 1982 and 1989, during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons. By 1986, the State Department admits that Afghanistan is ‘probably the world’s largest producer of opium for export’ and ‘the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.’ U.S. officials, however, fail to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade, help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels.

Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that pattern has been repeated. Afghan opium and heroin production has skyrocketed, primarily because NATO forces have aligned themselves, and propped up, those responsible for the dramatic rise in poppy cultivation: Hamid Karzai’s warlord-infested narco-state. But rather than pointing a finger at the source of what amount to protected drug rackets–the CIA and NATO–RFE/RL and their media accomplices are stitching-up the Islamic Republic for a fall. One more reason then, for launching a preemptive war.

But Iranian officials have charged that opium and heroin production in Afghanistan have had a severe impact inside Iran and, like Russia, have accused the U.S. of turning a blind eye when it comes to fighting opium production. Indeed, Sergei Blagov reported for ISN Security Watch that “Russia’s top officials have described the situation as ‘narco-aggression’ against Russia and a new ‘opium war’.”

“The Russian press,” Blagov wrote, “has been even less diplomatic, claiming that US and NATO forces were directly involved in the drug trade. Russian media outlets allege that the bulk of the drugs produced in Afghanistan’s southern and western provinces are shipped abroad on US planes.”

Commenting on the “creative destruction” wrought by NATO, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in The Daily Mail that the West’s “economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.”

According to Murray, facts clearly established by multiple law enforcement agencies, Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.”

“How can this have happened, and on this scale?” Murray wonders. “The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government–the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”

But let’s not let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of stopping Qom’s “new Hitlers”!

Far from being complicit in the drug trade, as Reuters reported, while Iran “is a main transit route for bringing heroin and opium to Western markets from Asia … the United Nations’ top anti-drugs official in Tehran praised the country for its efforts in stopping traffickers and seizing narcotics.”

“Definitely drug control is one of the positive stories (from Iran),” said Roberto Arbitrio, representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).”

“This is the first country in the world in terms of opiate seizures,” he told the news agency in an interview, referring to opium, morphine and heroin. “Last year it was 300 tons.”

If ubiquitous facts on the ground speak volumes then, as Reuters disclosed, “Iran’s campaign was showing results with the country seizing an estimated 20-40 percent of trafficked volumes, as compared to 5-10 percent in the United States and Europe;” a telling statistic not likely to be repeated by war-hungry media in the West.

Indeed, UNODOC reported last November that Iran, along with Afghanistan and Pakistan have entered into an agreement “designed to strengthen drug control among the three countries most seriously affected by Afghan opium. The initiative promotes information exchange and intelligence-led operations targeting the major transnational networks.”

“All three parties,” UNODOC’s Executive Director Yury Fedotov averred, have launched a “Triangular Initiative” that has already boosted “their cross-border counter-narcotics capacities.” Tellingly, a “joint planning cell has been established in Tehran to enhance analytical and operational capacity and to launch joint operations.” (emphasis added)

According to Fedotov, the planning and operational cell “has notched up successes. Since 2009, 12 drug control operations coordinated by the joint planning cell have resulted in the seizures of several tons of illicit drugs and the arrest of many drug traffickers.”

This is certainly not the message that war planners in Washington care to hear. But what can we learn closer to home where the Obama administration has the media’s ear and can exert influence over own America’s benighted “War on Drugs”?

When two planes filled with nearly ten tons of coke were seized in Mexico, in commercial jets tricked-out to resemble those flown by the Department of Homeland Security (see Daniel Hopsicker’s eye-opening archive on the story) or when the fourth largest U.S. bank, Wachovia, pled guilty to laundering $378.4 billion in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and got off with a slap on the wrist, or when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms let guns “walk” across the border, right into the hands of the CIA’s favorite narcotrafficking gang, the Sinaloa Cartel as Bill Conroy over at Narco News exposed (see the archive here), corporate media responded with a collective yawn.

In fact, Narco News revealed in December that in an upcoming trial in Chicago of one of the Sinaloa cartel’s top leaders, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, federal prosecutors are seeking to bar defense evidence that U.S. government agencies, including the CIA and the DEA, had “entered into a pact with the leadership of the Mexican Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization that supposedly provide its chief narcos with immunity in exchange for them providing US authorities with information that could be used to target other narco-trafficking organizations.”

Conroy disclosed that “US prosecutors do confirm in court filings that another high-level Sinaloa ‘Cartel’ member, Mexican attorney Loya Castro, has worked as a DEA cooperating source for some 10 years (and as recently as this year) while also working for the Sinaloa organization.”

“Loya Castro, Narco News revealed, “acted as the intermediary representing the Sinaloa organization in its quid pro quo arrangement with the US government, Zambada Niebla’s court pleadings allege.” Indeed, to protect their dirty deals with Mexico’s largest drug gang, a multibillion dollar enterprise whose tentacles stretch across the Americas, the “US government, in court pleadings filed in September, lodged a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, a measure designed to assure national security information does not become public during court proceedings.”

What might threaten America’s “national security,” pray tell?

As Daniel Hopsicker disclosed last summer, when “embattled” acting ATF director Kenneth Melson testified before Congress he refused “to go down for a program [Fast and Furious] which he had little or nothing to do with originating.”

Pointing a finger at U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Melson told congressional grifters that “the evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities.”

As Hopsicker pointed out, those “shadowy other government agencies” is “the very definition of the CIA.”

Hopsicker asked: “If the CIA is arming Mexican drug cartels, might they not also have been behind the otherwise-puzzling effort to supply these same drug lords with top-quality American-registered airplanes and jets?”

“Were the two now-infamous American-registered planes busted in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying almost ten tons of cocaine part of this same so-far unnamed Operation behind the ATF’s Operation Gunwalker?”

As we now know, at least one of the drug planes, “a Gulfstream business jet (N987SA)” Hopsicker revealed, were part of a fleet of fifty planes purchased through money laundered by Wachovia Bank as both Bloomberg Markets Magazine and The Observer reported, at least one of which were used to transport kidnapped “terrorist” suspects on CIA “ghost flights.”

But that’s all the past, we should “look forward, not backward.” Why bother with “ancient history” when there’s a new war to gin-up?

According to the Treasury Department press release, “The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force (IRGC-QF) General Gholamreza Baghbani as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act). This is the first use of the Kingpin Act against an Iranian official.”

“Today’s action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking narcotics, made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of a broader scheme to support terrorism. Treasury will continue exposing narcotics traffickers and terrorist supporters wherever they operate,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen.

If Treasury Department allegations can be believed, and given Cohen’s role as Obama’s point-man for enforcing Iran sanctions the charges reek to high-heaven. “General Baghbani,” we’re told, “allowed Afghan narcotics traffickers to smuggle opiates through Iran in return for assistance. For example, Afghan narcotics traffickers moved weapons to the Taliban on behalf of Baghbani. In return, General Baghbani has helped facilitate the smuggling of heroin precursor chemicals through the Iranian border. He also helped facilitate shipments of opium into Iran.”

Jumping feet first into the fray, the right-wing Long War Journal, charge that “Al Qaeda is also known to facilitate travel for its operatives moving into Afghanistan from Mashad. Al Qaeda additionally uses the eastern [Iranian] cities of Tayyebat and Zahedan to funnel its operatives into Afghanistan.”

We’re told that “several [unnamed] Taliban commanders based in western Afghanistan have stated that they have received weapons, cash, and training from Iranian forces. Taliban commanders and units train inside Iran to conduct attacks against NATO and Afghan forces. In addition, al Qaeda operatives are also known to receive support from the Ansar Corps; Mashad is a transit point for al Qaeda operatives en route to Afghanistan.”

LWJ’s “proof”? Why none other than a 2010 statement from disgraced ISAF commander General Stanley McCrystal, who said that “Iran is training Taliban fighters and providing them with weapons”! Case closed, right?

But as with last year’s discredited Iranian “Qods Force” plot to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in an upscale Washington restaurant, evidence has since emerged that a key figure named in the conspiracy by failed Texas used-car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer Gholam Shakuri, has been fingered by Iranian officials and Interpol as a member of the Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK), according to Tehran Times.

Mehr News Agency reported that “Interpol has found new evidence showing that the number two suspect in connection with the alleged Iranian government’s involvement in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington is a key member of the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO).”

According to Mehr, “Gholam Shakuri was last seen in Washington and Camp Ashraf in Iraq where MKO members are based.”

Citing an Interpol report, the news agency alleged that “the person in question has been travelling to different countries under the names of Ali Shakuri/Gholam Shakuri/Gholam-Hossein Shakuri by using fake passports including forged Iranian passports. One passport used by the person was issued on 30/11/2006 in Washington. The passport number was K10295631.”

As with the now-discredited plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, allegedly to be carried out in cahoots with a member of Mexico’s violence-prone Zetas Cartel, who turned out to be a DEA informant, Treasury Department charges against General Gholamreza Baghbani should be taken with a grain of salt.

As journalist Gareth Porter noted in his investigation of the Arbabsiar plot, “the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to ‘attack’ the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped ‘in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,’ according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.”

Coming just days before the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), bowing to U.S. pressure, cut off 30 Iranian financial institutions, including its Central Bank, from its network in a bid to cripple Iran economically, the allegations against Baghbani should be viewed as another psychological component of America’s shadow war.

With lurid tales of Iranian involvement with the Taliban and the drug trade front and center, expect a new round of alarmist reports from Western media while the same punditocracy do their best to bury evidence of U.S. secret state complicity in the global drug scourge.

And why not? As Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer in 2009, “he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

After all, $352 billion buys a lot of omertà.

The NEJM demands that letters to the journal contain material that has not been submitted or published elsewhere, so I had to refrain from submitting my longer piece anywhere until the NEMJ made a decision on my letter. When my letter did not appear after a couple of weeks I inquired, and was told that the article would soon appear in the printed version of the Journal, and that no letters about the article could be published until after the print version came out. The printed version finally appeared on June 16.

However, on July 1,1 was notified by the NEMJ that they would not publish my letter due to “space constraints.” The four letters that they did publish in response to the article were at most only mildly critical and missed the glaring short-comings of the report. In other words, NEMJ sat on my letter and effectively stifled my critique of what can only be described as industry propaganda for almost three months until public attention had moved on to other matters. However, with attention once again focused on the still-out of control Fukushima reactors on the first anniversary of the accident, my expose on how the media and academia have joined together to downplay the dangers of nuclear power is a poignant as ever.

*****

Since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima started in March, the media has been full of misinformation about the dangers posed by the nuclear accidents and the damage caused by past accidents such as those at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Whether it is Jay Lehr on Fox News¹  or George Monbiot on Democracy Now,² the story line is the same: there were only dozens of deaths from the Chernobyl and none from TMI, the health consequences for the general population are negligible, and all things considered nuclear power is among the safest forms of energy. In some cases the lines are spoken by industry hacks whose true motive is to protect profits, while other times the spokesperson is a global warming tunnel visionist who has lost sight of the fact that we as humans have ingeniously devised a multitude of ways to mess up our planet, including nuclear wars and disasters.

Lehr and Monbiot both made reference to a 2005 report commissioned by the United Nations that included the participation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO) and several other UN-linked agencies. Oddly enough, the official press release by the UN announcing publication of the report starts off with the following sentence:  “A total of up to four thousand people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.”

The reference to 50 deaths pertained to those “directly attributed” to radiation from the disaster. Moreover, this report represents the most conservative of studies from credible sources, with other estimates reaching as high as almost one million Chernobyl deaths.

Lehr works for a public policy think-tank and Monbiot is a journalist. Perhaps we should expect writers from those professions to misleadingly cite sources in order to promote a preset agenda in the hope that no one will check their sources. However, it comes as a shock that medical doctors writing in a prestigious medical journal like the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) would resort to the same practice. On April 20 the NEJM published an article by six doctors entitled: “Short-term and Long-term Health Risks of Nuclear-Power-Plant Accidents.”  I will not presume to know what the motives of the authors were or what led them to their erroneous conclusions, but I do feel the need to point out the errors that somehow the NEJM’s peer review process failed to notice.

The authors prominently cite two International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) studies in downplaying the deaths from Chernobyl. The authors state that “[a]lthough the Three Mile Island accident has not yet led to identifiable health effects, the Chernobyl accident resulted in 28 deaths related to radiation exposure in the year after the accident. The long-term effects of the Chernobyl accident are still being characterized, as we discuss in more detail below.” What is the reader intended to take from this statement? First of all, that the TMI accident in its totality did not cause any health effects that have been identified, which is itself a problematic statement. Secondly, that the total deaths from Chernobyl were the 28 in the first year plus whatever would be discussed later in the paper. As it turns out, the rest of the paper only mentions fatalities one other time, and that is that 11 of 13 plant and emergency workers that underwent bone marrow transplants died, and it is not clear whether or not these eleven are included in the above mentioned 28 fatalities. So the reader is left with the impression that the studies that the NEJM authors are citing conclude that the Chernobyl accident in its totality produced only a few dozen fatalities.

However, just as with Lehr and Monbiot, the NEJM authors start with the most conservative studies and then are misleading in their citations. They ignore the existence of high-profile studies that draw very different conclusions, omit the more damning parts of the studies they do cite, and then quote statements that were not intended to portray the totality of the accidents as if they were bottom line conclusions.

For instance, in making the assertion that Chernobyl caused 28 deaths in the first year, the NEJM authors cited an IAEA report that actually said: “The accident caused the deaths within a few days or weeks of 30 ChNPP employees and firemen (including 28 deaths that were due to radiation exposure).”

Notice that the IAEA statement is limited to power plant employees and fireman, whereas the authors imply the entire population. In fact, that IAEA study focused on the “600 emergency workers who were on the site of the Chernobyl power plant during the night of the accident,” and not the exposed population at large or the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” who worked to contain the plant over the next couple years. Moreover, the IAEA study did not preclude the possibility that some of the liquidators or general public could have been killed due to radiation exposure in the first year, not to mention subsequent years. While the authors only mention a handful of cancer deaths in subsequent years, the second IAEA study acknowledges that among the one million or so most exposed, several thousand Chernobyl-caused cancer deaths would be “very difficult to detect.” The study states the following:

The projections indicate that, among the most exposed populations (liquidators, evacuees and residents of the so-called ‘strict control zones’) total cancer mortality might increase by up to a few per cent owing to Chernobyl related radiation exposure. Such an increase could mean eventually up to several thousand fatal cancers in addition to perhaps one hundred thousand cancer deaths expected in these populations from all other causes. An increase of this magnitude would be very difficult to detect, even with very careful long term epidemiological studies.

Clearly, the content of these two IAEA studies was not accurately reflected in the NEJM article. Moreover, the IAEA is not necessarily the best source of information. It was never intended to protect the public from the dangers of nuclear power plants. That is not part of its mission. The statute of the IAEA states that:

[t]he Agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world.  It shall ensure, so far as it is able, that assistance provided by it or at its request or under its supervision or control is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.

Thus, the IAEA was created to PROMOTE nuclear power (while checking the proliferation of nuclear weapons). It therefore cannot be assumed to be an unbiased or authoritative source of information on the health risks of nuclear power.

The NEJM article is misleading or inaccurate in other instances. For instance, its discussion is weighted too much towards whole body radiation, which is really only relevant to the emergency workers. The article acknowledges that it is not whole body radiation, but rather internal contamination that is “the primary mechanism through which large populations around a reactor accident can be exposed to radiation.” So why emphasize whole body radiation if it is not the mechanism through which populations are endangered?

They then launched into a long discussion about acute radiation sickness, which is largely a red herring since the threat to the general public is mainly from cancer. The NEJM article further obfuscates the issue with a table that compares the effective doses of radiation that a resident near a nuclear accident is exposed to with what someone is exposed to from something mundane like an airplane ride or a chest x-ray. This is like comparing the force of a cool breeze to the force of a knife slicing the jugular. The knife is lethal because it allows a very small amount of force to be concentrated on a vulnerable target. Similarly, the risk to Fukushima residents is not radiation spread out over their entire body, but rather radioisotopes like iodine 131 being concentrated by biological processes into a vulnerable target like the thyroid.

The NEJM authors mislead in other ways. They write “After Chernobyl, approximately 5 million people in the region may have had excess radiation exposure, primarily through internal contamination.” They cite the second IAEA study. The reader is likely to assume that up to 5 million people in the countries in Europe and Asia where the fallout from Chernobyl may have reached could have been exposed to excess radiation (i.e. radiation in excess of normal), and that this is the limit of exposure to internal radiation.

However, the IAEA study is only referring to the contamination region designated by the former USSR (a small area in the corners of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) and does not imply that excess radiation exposure (internal or otherwise) was limited to this area. In fact, they do not use the word “excess,” but rather specify a particular level of radioactive cesium. The actual wording of the IAEA report was as follows:

More than five million people live in areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine that are classified as ‘contaminated’ with radionuclides due to the Chernobyl accident (above 37 kBq m-2 of 137Cs).

On the same page, the report also states that “The cloud from the burning reactor spread numerous types of radioactive materials, especially iodine and caesium (sic) radionuclides, over much of Europe.” It added that radioactive cesium-137 “is still measurable in soils and some foods in many parts of Europe.”  Thus, there certainly were people outside of this narrow region of 5 million inhabitants who also were exposed to Chernobyl radiation through their environment and food. Indeed, the authors discuss the move by Polish authorities to administer potassium iodide to 10 million Polish children. Obviously Polish officials feared radiation exposure to these people.

Furthermore, there is major omission in the authors’ discussion of radiation. They discuss beta and gamma radiation, but do not mention alpha radiation. They then go on to dismiss the danger of plutonium contamination, which is dangerous precisely because it is an alpha emitter. They state that “Radioisotopes with a … very long half-life (e.g., 24,400 years for plutonium-239) … do not cause substantial internal or external contamination in reactor accidents.” The authors are either lying or ignorant. The danger from plutonium-239 has nothing to do with its half-life (long half-lives indicate slower radioactive decay). Plutonium, if ingested internally, is dangerous because the large and heavy alpha particles it emits are the most damaging to DNA and the most likely to cause cancer. In fact, Plutonium is the most lethal substance known to mankind.

As mentioned above, the IAEA cannot be thought of as an authoritative, unbiased source of health information given its explicit mission of promoting nuclear power. The same can be said for other sources cited by the authors, including the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. At the same time, the authors ignored prominent studies produced independently of the nuclear industry and affiliated governmental bodies that indicate that there were indeed serious public health consequences from the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accident.

Significantly, the authors failed to mention the seminal work on the consequences of radiation exposure from Chernobyl done by Yablokov, Nesterenko and Nesterenko of the Russian National Academy of Sciences.³ This team of scientists from Russia and Belarus studied health data, radiological surveys and 5,000 scientific reports from 1986 to 2004, mostly in Slavic languages, and estimated that the Chernobyl accident caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide. Given the prominence of this report and the fact that its findings are completely at odds with the conclusions reached by the IAEA and other sources cited by the authors, it was intellectually dishonest not to mention the report if only to dismiss it.

Indeed, the Yablokov et al report is hardly the only major study to contrast starkly with the minimalist portrayal of the health consequences from nuclear accidents. Regarding Three Mile Island, there is the June 1991 Columbia University Health Study (Susser-Hatch) of the health impacts from the TMI accident published its findings in the American Journal of Public Health and subsequent work by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina. These studies point to increased incidences of cancer in areas close to the reactor or downwind from it.

Another example of minimizing potential health impacts of a nuclear plant accident is this statement in connection with the accident at Fukushima:

Although the radioactivity in seawater close to the plant may be transiently higher than usual by several orders of magnitude, it diffuses rapidly with distance and decays over time, according to half-life, both before and after ingestion by marine life.

Japan has a massive fishing industry because, along with rice, fish is the staple of the Japanese diet. Any release of radiation into coastal fishing grounds will wind up being concentrated through biological processes as it works its way up the food chain and eventually to the Japanese dinner table. The narrow restrictions on commercial fishing near the Fukushima coast may be obeyed by fisherman, but many of the fish they seek are migratory, and there is no way of preventing these fish or their food sources from passing through contaminated water. Moreover, the claim that the radioactivity “decays over time” glosses over exactly how much time. While some of the radioisotopes being spilled into the ocean have half-lives of days, others have half-lives of years and even millennia. The impact on health from releases into the ocean cannot be so lightly dismissed.

Although it will take some time for the dust (or fallout) to settle, it may well turn out that the Fukushima disaster is the worst nuclear accident of all-time, surpassing Chernobyl. The contamination from the Chernobyl accident led to the establishment of a 30-kilometer wide “zone of alienation” to which people are not allowed to return. The current evacuation zone around the Fukushima plant is of comparable size, and with the Fukushima reactors continuing to release contamination for the foreseeable future, the only question is how large will be Japan’s “zone of alienation.” And while greater Tokyo has so far been largely spared due to the prevailing winds blowing so much of the contamination into the Pacific, winds will be changing with the upcoming monsoon season and the summer typhoons. [Note: countless radioactive “hot spots” have since been detected all over greater Tokyo, particularly in places where rain water accumulates.]

It is this proximity to Tokyo, one of the world’s most densely populated metropolises, that could make Fukushima the worst industrial calamity in history. An increase in cancer mortality even of the “difficult to detect” scale referred to by the IAEA study described above could condemn several tens of thousands of people. And that is far from being the worst case. The NEJM authors and others who propagate myths about the minimal casualties from Chernobyl and other accidents feed into a mindset that is leading to disastrous policy decisions. The only way to correct course is to identify the myths and the mythmakers.

1. Jay Lehr said that at Chernobyl “the bottom line was that 50 people died in the explosion from radiation from fire…”
2. George Monbiot stated that “so far the death toll from Chernobyl amongst both workers and local people is 43.”
3. Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko, “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment“,  2010, Nature – 400. Also available at: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1181

Nuclear power? We don’t have a hope. These people are so far off the track they should be classified as stark raving lunatics. The population is not out on the street demanding the removal of all the lunatics? They must all be lunatics too.
– Tony Boys, nuclear crisis archive

Damnably unstable atoms have been carelessly released from the Demon From Hell Nuclear Reactor in Fukushima, Japan. That’s OK: a becqueral a day keeps the doctor away, but not the undertaker.

On paper, Japan has radiation exposure limits for food that are the same as the EU and stricter than the UN or the USA. Beginning on April 1, 2012, standards will become even stricter allowing for only 100 becquerals per kilogram (Bq/kg) in food. So those of us living in Japan will be pretty safe? Not so fast.

I recently came across a researcher named William Milberry whose Youtube site has a number of informative reports on the radioactive contamination levels in food and soil in Japan. In one video I learned of the following website that does independent testing and was not shocked to learn that much of the food in the northeastern and greater Tokyo region that is being produced has detectable levels of radiation.¹ Even for those who cannot read Japanese: (Test results of radioactive materials in food) Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and opening subsequent links and pdf files there are lists of food by prefecture and at the far right of the chart you will see the English for Bq/kg and below that the numbers for cesium, 134 and 137. Entries are posted nearly everyday and I perused several, including one page that covered early March. The chart shows that a number of prefectures in the northeast of Japan including Fukushima have food products such as beef, eggs, soybeans and vegetables that contain cesium. What the tests do not measure, but we can suspect may be there as well, is strontium and other potentially harmful radio nuclides.

Many items appear to be eggs and meat, for example, and may have less than 20 bq/kg. It should be remembered that it is possible that small amounts of radiation may be detected due to background sources or from the atmospheric atomic bomb tests. On another page I discovered that in Fukushima prefecture 19,191 items were tested with 683 items above the 500 becqueral limit (therefore not sold), with most of those items being mushrooms or fish. Only two items of grain, wheat and brown rice, were found over the limit out of 1,847 grains tested. In other prefectures around Fukushima, there have been fewer tests and fewer items found to be over the safety limit. Certainly the lion’s share of radiation from the Fukushima blasts that did not go out to sea landed in that prefecture.

However, this data is contradicted by the following report:

The Fukushima prefectural government announced on January 27 that radioactive cesium exceeding the provisional safety limit (500 becquerels/kg) was detected from “mochi” rice produced by a farmer in Date City in Fukushima Prefecture. The density was 1110 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium. According to the prefectural government, 57.5 kilograms of this rice had already been sold by the first half of November 2011 at a direct sales depot in the city. The direct sales depot is calling for the return of the rice.

Therefore, while what appear to be fairly rigorous standards for independent testing of food items exists, there is still room for error, omission, or possible criminal negligence if suppliers are hiding facts about radiation in their products. These foods are being distributed around Japan as if they are safe to eat, but are they really? Given the choice between genetically modified or radioactive food versus GMO-free or radioactive-free food, which would you choose? Hmmm?

One acquaintance from Sweden told me “we should not get riled up” about the generally modest amount of radiation in Japanese food given they eat much higher levels in Europe and it is no problem. Reindeer meat in Sweden is sold at permissible levels of 1,500 becquerals per kilogram. But another fellow who used to work for the Canadian government as an environmental chemist warned me that “basically, no radiation should be acceptable other than background.” This report from the National Academy of Sciences finds that “there are no safe doses of radiation. Decades of research show clearly that any dose of radiation increases an individual’s risk for the development of cancer.”

Videos by Ian Goddard help to understand the science of risk assessment of radiation. In his description of the scientific method (beginning at 5:40 in the video) he uses a chart to explain how the pyramid of scientific evidence has nine levels of meaningfulness in terms of scientific validity. In the case he is citing the authors of a pro-nuclear paper try to show how radiation is essentially safe by only relying on the lowest level of evidence verification, yet passing it off as high quality research. Contrast this to Yablokov’s book which posits that about a million people have died from Chernobyl, a number that is vastly higher than what the nuclear establishment would have us believe. Yablokov and his team of researchers take into account complex epidemiological studies and evidence gathering involving case reports, systematic reviews and meta analyses of previous high quality data and studies.

Therefore, can we trust the establishment view that the levels of external and internal radiation in Japan (and Fukushima’s effects overseas) are safe? This is a long term science experiment to see what the threshold of cancer and other diseases will be over the next three hundred years, which is the time cesium remains radioactive. Remember, even if an adult were to consume a certain level of “safe” radiation in their food, that does not mean the DNA of a parent may not be adversely affected and their damaged DNA passed to their offspring. This is what scientists in the Chernobyl region are discovering twenty five years after that accident: species of insects and birds seem to be de-evolving toward a permanent die-off of the ecosystem.

I try to buy most of my food from other regions than the northeast by getting vegetables and rice from much farther southwest in the country. Although I tried to convince my wife otherwise, the rice she buys is organically grown but from northern Akita prefecture which is about 270 km to the north of the danger zone. Their website claims the rice has less than one bq/kg and that they abide strict standards.

Many people simply do not care about what is in their food, be it chemical agents in processed “food” to give it flavor, or unintentional amounts of pollutants from farming, nuclear accidents or industrial blow-off. I have heard many stories of spouses in Japan who have differing opinions on the radiation matter with one spouse very concerned while the other blurts out in frustration: “who cares, we have to eat!”

As the Ex-SKF blogger notes:

Who is going to eat Fukushima rice? Probably the same people eating it now, at schools, hospitals, at family restaurants, convenience stores. Oh and the increasingly unpopular prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, who demanded that the Japanese citizens eat Fukushima rice like he did every day.

The nuclear cartel is using the media to brainwash people to “shut up and eat” by pimping pop stars and flashing adverts at them. Richer and more educated people can buy their food from upscale markets where foods are imported from farther distances, and that cost more. The average people who can’t be bothered to worry or can’t afford it will eat the cheap rice ball from the convenience store. School children (in the less affluent districts?) will have the cesium laced rice served at their school lunches.

To make matters worse it has now been decided that Tokyo will will burn radioactive debris at the 23 wards in the city. It is reported that incinerators are rigged for household garbage and not industrial or radioactive waste. In Tokyo Bay radioactive ashes are being dumped without proper treatment, allowing the spread of cesium in the local environment (18). These kinds of sloppy practices are further evidence of a government that is short sighted, incompetent and dangerous.

Some people think “Japan is finished” or that “most of Japan is now uninhabitable” which is not true. On the other hand, it is still a very grave situation in Fukushima and the government’s attitude that anyone who is opposed to nukes is “as stupid as a monkey” is no laughing matter.

1. National food survey data of radioactivity; Radioactivity in food inspection by date; Radioactivity in food inspection.

— Associated Press, February 3, 2012

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnapped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the run-up to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that the bodies of the three victims remained in the apartment one month after they had starved to death.  They were only discovered when the landlord of the apartment complex called the police and went with officers to demand payment of months overdue rent.  Newspaper reports indicate that the family was several months behind on the rent and that electric and gas service to the apartment had already been shut off.  Neighbors reported that the family had asked at least one neighbor for assistance, but was turned away and told to go to the Social Welfare office.

The fact that the landlord was the only person interested in the fate of the family is a stunning, yet increasingly familiar, example of the social isolation many people experience today.  Of course, neither the landlord nor the police were driven by humanistic impulses to check on the family, their visit was motivated purely by money.  The relationship between the family and the landlord was a market relationship – the landlord using his property ownership to extract money from the family who might otherwise face homelessness.  Nothing unusual here.  Most of us are engaged in similar relationships.

What’s new about the situation that led to these deaths by starvation is that these market relations are now often the only human relationships people participate in.  A profound sense of social isolation has been growing inside of capitalist society.  As people are forced to spend more time at work, spaces for social interaction collapse and daily life is reduced to a series of market relations arbitrated by money.  This is particularly true in Japan, where decades of economic decline have undermined social bonds of solidarity by  introducing  casual labor – jobs with no guarantee of future employment, rising homelessness and a generational dislocation that has left the elderly to fend for themselves.

About 4.6 million elderly people now live alone in Japan and the number of people dying at home has increased by 61% between 2003 and 2010, from 1,364 to 2,194, according to the Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health in Tokyo.   Although there are a number of civil society initiatives underway to attempt to combat this growing isolation, social conventions such as prohibitions on helping neighbors and unattainable notions of the proper family structure have combined with cuts to welfare state budgets to undermine those efforts.

And socially isolated Japanese will find that they are part of a global trend launched in large part by the world’s largest capitalist economy – the United States.  Since the shift to neoliberal economics in the 1970’s, US residents have been at the cutting edge of trends of social isolation.   Evidence of the extent of this mass alienation came in a 2006 study which reported that one in four of those interviewed had no one with whom they could discuss personal troubles.  And, compared with 1985, nearly 50% more people in 2004 reported that the only person they can confide in was their spouse.  As the left-wing psychoanalyst Harriet Fraad has indicated, with the exception of self-help groups and fundamentalist churches, nearly all voluntary social groups, like bowling leagues, that might offer a sense social solidarity have disappeared.

Much like in Japan, the trends toward social isolation have been re-enforced by sharp reductions in welfare state spending in the US.  Many of these came in the mid-1990s during the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton who pledged to “end welfare as we know it.”  Welfare cuts backed up by a growth in casual labor have resulted in a massive increase in the number of hours spent at work.  More than 80% of males in the US and 60% of female workers spend more than 40 hours a week at work. Compare this with a Scandinavian country such as Norway where about 20% of males and 7% of females work more than 40 hours of week.   Voluntary social groups collapsed as more and more free time was consumed by wage work.  The result is the neoliberal dream, a society of individuals – slaves to their worksites, in terror of their bosses and unable to relate to one another after decades of social isolation.

This is the socio-economic recipe that can allow for people to starve to death inside of two of the richest societies in the history of the world.  We should use this gruesome example to evaluate two other situations.  The first comes from Greece where economic crisis is being translated into savage cuts to wages and social welfare.  If you wonder why popular movements in Greece are resisting this austerity so militantly, think of this family in Saitama starving to death alone in their apartment.  This is precisely the future that the people of Greece are resisting.  And it is how we might evaluate our own life possibilities.  Do we want to live in a society where it is possible to be so socially isolated that you can starve to death and the only person who will care is your landlord and the police?

Consider this as an extended description of why I am a democratic socialist and a prime cultural motivation for the recent Occupy Wall Street movement.  Occupy has created a social space where people can get back to relating with each other based on a common humanity and desire for an ethical society.  And socialism has always held up a mirror to capitalist society and said that there is more than enough food to feed everyone in the world, that people should have time enough to develop themselves fully and that every human life is precious, carrying with it the nearly unlimited possibilities to make our world a better place.   The next great radical movement in US history will be one with a unquenchable desire to reverse the damage done by neoliberal capitalism.  In other words to take on the necessary task of re-connecting humanity.

We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under.

— Martin Van Creveld, Professor of Military History at Israel’s Hebrew University, September 2003, in Dutch weekly, Elsevier

Iran: we have been here before. The year prior to the assault on, and near destruction of, unarmed neighbouring Iraq, George W. Bush, of course, declared the “Axis of Evil”, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

But it was the man now hailed “peacemaker”, former President Jimmy Carter, who, in his State of the Union Address on 23 January 1980, made the most chilling statement  – until the current political psychopathy – regarding a possible nuclear strike on Iran.

Very simplisticly put, the then Soviet Union supported Afghanistan’s leftist government, and eventually invaded the country in their defence, against challenges by the traditionalist, conservative Muslim majority and (US backed) Mujahideen.

The Carter Administration at the time seemed not too bothered by the invasion.  A few trade sanctions were imposed here and there, but no more. The plight of Afghanistan’s people was of little consequence. However, neighbouring Iran, with its vast oil reserves and the threat to Western oil supplies being shipped through the Straits of Hormuz, then, as now, was a different matter.

An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America … such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.¹

Later, a US Defence Department Report, seemingly leaked by the Administration, stated that should the Soviet Union invade Northern Iran, the use of nuclear weapons would be considered.

However, the Soviet Union too had nuclear weapons, so in those now ironically safer seeming days of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (“MAD”), the US simply contented itself with arming the Afghan Mujahideen – which it is now slaughtering, droning, taking body parts of as trophies – and urinating on.

The Carter Administration simply contented itself with building a Rapid Deployment Force, expanding the US naval presence in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

That Deployment Force eventually became Centcom.

Carter won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for his work: “to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts.”

Further ironically, the United States, in 1957, had embarked on a civil nuclear policy with Iran, as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme.

In September 1967, the US supplied 5,545 kgs of enriched uranium to Iran, the majority of which (5,165 kgs) contained fissile isotopes for fuelling a research reactor, research Iran says it is undertaking, which the US now threatens to bomb.  At the same time, the US supplied 112 g of plutonium, of which 104 gs  were also for start up of a research reactor.

In the 1970s the US supported the building of up to twenty nuclear power plants throughout Iran. Contracts were signed with a number of  other Western countries.

In 1975, Iran signed a contract with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology  (M.IT) for training of Iran’s nuclear engineers.

Incidentally, Iran ratified both the Partial Nuclear Test Ban treaty of 1963 and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. Israel, another of the sabre rattlers, has signed neither.

Bombing nuclear reactors is beyond even the actions of the certifiably insane. On 26 April 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, until 2011 and Fukushima, was Chernobyl.

When an explosion blasted a hole in the roof of the plant, tons of radioactive material were blown into the atmosphere and traversed the world. To this day there are hill farmers in the UK whose sheep are still found to be too radioactive from the resultant fallout — nearly 2,000 miles away 26 years ago — to sell for meat.

The people in the Chernobyl region were exposed to radiation about 100 times greater than that from the Hiroshima bomb. Since then thousands have become ill and died of cancers and other diseases.

Over 400,000 people had to leave their homes. The water of Ukraine and Belarus is still affected, the ground in which they plant still contaminated.

There have been a litany of nuclear accidents over the years, the first, which remained the worst until Chernobyl, was at the Windscale plant on the UK’s (western) Cumbria Coast. The British responded by changing its name to Sellafield.

When Pan Am Flight 103, was blown up over Lockerbie, on 21 December 1988, hearing the news flash, I picked up a UK atlas. It was close enough for wreckage to have fallen on and damaged the plant. A call to a shaken operative at Sellafield within minutes of the crash, caught him off guard, they were, he said: “combing the (vast) compounds for debris and damage right now …”

The wreckage from Pan Am’s tragedy was strewn 1,000 square miles.  Sellafield was just 48 miles away under the main trans-Atlantic air route. Depending on the exact route of the flight potentially a few minutes later the disaster could potentially have been even more appalling, by orders of unimaginable magnitude.

The route, incidentally, has not been changed.

Whilst somewhat off topic, this tragedy illustrates what has been repeatedly studied – and ignored: “Nuclear plant operators have normally considered accident sequences (called ‘beyond design basis’ events) so unlikely that they have not built in (sufficient) safeguards.”  These include tsunamis, earthquakes, air crashes, terrorist attacks – and deliberate bombings.

These stark vulnerabilities are hardly likely to have escaped Pentagon planners.

In an article published in the early 1980s, as valid now as then (see i., p 60-61) Dr Kosta Tsipsis of MIT and Steven Fetter, wrote in Scientific American on “Catastrophic Releases of Radioactivity.”

A one-megaton nuclear weapon on a one-gigawatt nuclear power plant would vaporise the plant’s radioactive contents, along with everything (and everyone) in the vicinity. The remains would be carried on the wind in a mushroom cloud, falling out to poison people, fauna, flora, where the wind blew. Some 1700 square miles would be uninhabitable immediately due to potentially  lethal radiation levels.

“The destruction of a nuclear reactor with a nuclear weapon, even of a relatively small yield … would represent a national catastrophe of lasting consequences”, Tsipsis and Fetter wrote in an earlier paper.

Further, in a more extensive attack:

If anyone hid (themselves) deep enough under the earth and stayed there long enough to survive, (they) would emerge to a dying natural environment … there is no hole big enough to hide all of nature …

I have witnessed those affected by a reactor bombing, just a small experimental one, part of Baghdad University prior to the invasion. It was bombed by British or American planes three times in spite of having been permitted by the UN weapons inspectors. The childhood deformities in the area were epidemic. One clinic specialized in treating the young victims. This is what I wrote, a decade ago:

Six month old Yacoub Yusif, with his small hand twisted at right angle, with no thumb on his foreshortened right arm, was comparatively lucky.

Six year old Mustafa Ahmed, with his bright, intelligent face and great dark eyes had gross deformities of his stick-like legs and arms, of his facial bones. His hands were pathetically turned.

Sitting on the examination table like a frail broken doll, he said: “I can write.” Hunched over, a tiny piece of pencil (pencils are vetoed by the Sanctions Committee, since they contain graphite) and minute square of paper (also vetoed) he wrote, the stub clutched between his knuckles, in beautiful Arabic, laughing with triumph at his achievement.

Ali Samir, seven, shuffled in like a tiny, bird-like old man, the expression in his eyes was of one who has seen all the trials of the world.

He was covered with head to toe ulcerations which, as they healed tightened his skin – or ruptured. His fingers were turned inwards, seared in to his palms. He had no toes.

When his gay ‘Route 97′ top was lifted up, the terrible ulcerations on his back brought tears to the eyes. ‘Surgery is counter-indicated, since he won’t heal – this is a genetic malformation caused by environmental changes in pregnancy’, said Consultant, Dr. Harith, with commendable undersatement.

The Zafaranya district of Baghdad where he – all of them – lived, was bombed relentlessly in the 1991 Gulf War and a nuclear reactor reportedly hit. It was bombed again in 1993, and Ali was still recovering from this terror in December 1998, when the district – and believed the reactor, was hit again. He too could write and did so with evident pride – but he was unable to express it – he had no tongue.

And what of the fear now being inflicted on the children of Iran, the Middle East, this Damoclesian sword hanging over them?

I thought again of the late, great John E. Mack, psychiatrist of renown, who studied under Robert Jay Lifton, who has made the psychology of war and violence his distinguished lifetime’s work.

Before the Berlin Wall came down, when children in school were taught what to do if “the bomb” fell in government fantasy world instruction booklets, Mack received a call from the frantic mother of a five year old.

The little boy, apparently happy, well adjusted and without a care, stood as she cooked supper. Suddenly he asked her: “When the bomb drops, will the rabbit in the garden die too?”

How many more generations of children is nuclear insanity going to terrorize?

As this is being written, on 17 January, the 21st anniversary of the first near destruction of Iraq in “Desert Storm”, another US President and Nobel Peace Prize winner seems to be taking the world to the brink.

In Strasbourg in 1979 Earl Mountbatten of Burma told an audience, “In the event of nuclear war there will be no chances, there will be no survivors—all will be obliterated.”

The world needs no further wake up calls, from Windscale to Baghdad’s Zafaraniya, Chernobyl to Fukushima, from Falluja’s  radiation affected population, the forgotten affected of the Pacific Island tests over fifty years ago, and world wide – enough.

1. Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth”, is as valid now as when written in 1982. A quote from Studs Terkel’s review, on the back cover, reads: “There have been books that have changed our lives, this one may save our lives … It’s more than a book, it’s a bell in the night.”

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.

During our meeting yesterday, I noted that the Iranian president was absolutely calm and tranquil, completely unconcerned about the Yankee threats and, fully confident in the capacity of his people to confront any aggression and in the effectiveness of their arms —which, in large part, they produce themselves— to inflict an unpayable price on its aggressors.

In reality, we hardly spoke about the topic of war. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was focused on the ideas he had presented at the Main Hall of the University of Havana during his conference on the struggle of humankind:

Moving towards reaching and achieving peace, security, respect and human dignity as a fundamental desire of all human beings throughout history.

I am convinced that Iran will not commit any rash actions that might contribute to setting off a war. If a war were to be unleashed, it would inevitably be completely as a result of the recklessness and congenital irresponsibility of the Yankee Empire.

I believe that the political situation surrounding Iran and the associated risks of a nuclear war that involves us all —regardless of whether one possess nuclear weapons— are extremely delicate because they threaten the very existence of our species. The Middle East has become the most troubled region on the planet, the same region that produces the energy resources vital for the world’s economy.

The destructive power and the mass sufferings caused by some of the weapons used in World War Two led to a strong movement to ban weapons such as asphyxiating gas and others. Nevertheless, conflicting interests and the huge profits made by arms manufacturers led to the production of crueler and more destructive weapons; modern technology has now added the means and material to build weapons that if used in a world war would lead to extinction.

I support the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all those with a basic sense of responsibility, that no country big or small has the right to possess nuclear weapons.

They never should have been used to attack two defenseless cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating with horrible and long-lasting effects hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, in a country that had already been militarily defeated.

If fascism indeed forced the allied nations against Nazism to compete with this enemy of humanity in the production of such weapons, once the war ended and the United Nations was created, the first duty of this organization should have been to prohibit nuclear weapons without exception.

However, the United States, the strongest and richest power, forced the rest of the world to follow its lead. Today, they have hundreds of satellites that spy and monitor the entire world from outer space. Their naval, air and land forces are equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons; and they control the world’s finances and investments at their whim via the International Monetary Fund.

Analyzing the history of each Latin American nation, from Mexico to Patagonia, by way of Santo Domingo and Haiti, one can observe that each and every country, without exception, have suffered for 200 years, from the beginning of the 19th century up until today. And, in one way or another, they are increasingly suffering the worst crimes that power and force can commit against the rights of a people. Brilliant Latin American writers are emerging in an increasing number. One of them, Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that describes the aforementioned, has just been invited to open the prestigious Casa de Las Americas Awards as a recognition to his outstanding body of work.

Events happen incredibly fast; but technologies report them to the public even faster. On any given day, like today, important news comes out a dizzying pace. A cable report dated from January 11 states:

The Danish presidency of the European Union confirmed on Wednesday that a new series of more severe European sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear program, will be discussed on January 23. The new sanctions will not only target the oil industry but also the Central Bank.

During a meeting with international journalists, Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal said that “We will increase sanctions against the oil industry in addition to sanctions against financial structures.” This clearly demonstrates that, in order to impede nuclear proliferation, Israel can go on accumulating hundreds of nuclear warheads while Iran is not allowed to produce 20% enriched uranium.

Another article, from a respected British news agency, states that “China gave no hint on Wednesday of giving ground to U.S. demands to curb Iran’s oil revenues, rejecting Washington’s sanctions on Tehran as overstepping …”

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Just look at these lines reported by another important European news agency:

The murder on Wednesday of Iranian nuclear specialist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan [a scientist at the Natanz nuclear plant] was the fourth attack to kill a leading scientist in the country in almost exactly two years.

On January 12, 2010:

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University is killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle explodes outside his home in the capital.

On November 29, 2010:

Two attacks target leading Iranian nuclear scientists on the same day. Majid Shahriari, a key member of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, is killed in Tehran by a limpet bomb attached to his car. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani is also targeted by a bomb attached to his car, but escapes.

The car was parked in front of the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran where both men worked as professors.

On July 23, 2011:

Gunmen shoot dead Dariush Rezaei-Nejad, a senior scientist who is reportedly associated with the defense ministry, and wound his wife as they waited for their child outside a Tehran kindergarten.

On January 11, 2012 —the same day that Ahmadinejad travelled from Nicaragua to Cuba to give a conference at the University of Havana—, scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “a deputy director at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, is killed in a car bomb blast outside the [Allameh Tabatabai] University in east Tehran.” As in previous years “Iran once again accused the United States and Israel.”

The killings represent a systematic and selective slaughter of brilliant Iranian scientists. I have read articles by known Israeli sympathizers who write about crimes carried out by Israeli intelligence services in cooperation with the United States and NATO as if they were the most normal occurrence.

At the same time, Moscow news agencies report that “Russia warned that in Syria a similar scenario is developing as to that in Libya, and added that this time the attack will be launched from neighboring Turkey.

The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said the West wants to ‘punish Damascus not as much for repressing the opposition, but because it is unwilling to sever ties with Tehran.

…NATO members and some Persian Gulf states, operating according to the Libya scenario, intend to move from indirect intervention in Syrian affairs to direct military intervention…This time the main strikes forces will not be provided by France, the U.K. or Italy, but possibly by neighboring Turkey.

Washington and Ankara are now assumed to be negotiating a “no-fly” zone over Syria, where Syrian armed insurgents can be trained and concentrated, added Patrushev.

News is not only coming out of Iran and the Middle East, but also from other parts of Central Asia near the Middle East. These reports show the great complexity of the problems that can arise from this dangerous region.

The United States has been led by its contradictory and absurd imperial policy to get involved in serious problems in countries such as Pakistan, whose borders with Afghanistan were drawn up by the colonialists without taking into account culture or ethnicities.

In Afghanistan, which defended its independence against English colonialism for centuries, drug production has multiplied in the wake of the Yankee invasion. Meanwhile, European soldiers, supported by drone airplanes and armed with sophisticated US weapons, carry out deplorable massacres that increase the people’s hatred and ward off any possibilities of peace. All this and other dirty actions are also reported by Western news agencies.

WASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 – US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the actions of four U.S. marines who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan “utterly deplorable” The video of the act was circulated in the Internet.

I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable…

This conduct is entirely inappropriate for members of the United States military and does not reflect the standards of values our armed forces are sworn to uphold…

In reality, Panetta neither confirms nor denies the action, and anyone, including the Secretary of Defense himself, may harbor doubt.

But it is also extremely inhumane that men, women and children, or an Afghani combatant fighting against the foreign occupation, be murdered by bombs dropped by drone planes. Another very serious incident: dozens of Pakistani soldiers and officials who safeguarded the country’s borders have been killed by these bombs.

Afghani President Karzai stated that the outrage committed against the bodies was “simply inhumane.” He asked for the US government “to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

Meanwhile Taliban spokespersons declared that “over the last ten years, hundreds of similar acts have been carried out that were not reported…”

One even feels sorry for those soldiers, thousands of kilometers away from their family, friends and country, sent to fight in countries that they might not have even heard of during their school days, where they are assigned the task of killing or dying to enrich transnational companies, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous politicians who each year squander funds needed to feed and educate the uncountable millions of hungry and illiterate people around the world.

Many of these soldiers, victims of the trauma suffered, end up taking their own lives.

Is it an exaggeration to say that world peace is hanging by a thread?

In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which forced the USPS to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees, many of whom hadn’t even been hired yet.  Over a mere 10 year period, the USPS was required to prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years, something no other government or private corporation is required to do.  As consumer advocate Ralph Nader observed, if PAEA had never been enacted, USPS would now be facing a $1.5 billion surplus.

The USPS is a profitable, self-funded venture that is not supported by the taxpayers.  It is funded with postage stamps—one of the last vestiges of government-issued money.  Stamps are fungible and can be traded at par; and they are backed, not by mere government “fiat,” but by labor.  One stamp will buy the labor to transport your letter 3000 miles.

The USPS is one of the few businesses the government is allowed to operate in competition with private companies; it is the only U.S. agency that services all its citizens six days per week; and it is perhaps the last form of communication that protects privacy, since tampering with it is against federal law.  In 1999, it employed nearly a million people; and today, it employs over 600,000.  Where are those workers to go, when the post office is no more?

To Downsize or Diversify?

Whatever caused the financial woes of the USPS, there is another way to mitigate the crisis than slashing employee benefits and customer services.  In a December 21 article in Reader Supported News, Tim Fernholz suggested that instead of focusing on cuts, the post office should approach the problem from a business perspective and find a new way to make money.  One way to keep the USPS alive, he says, is for it to include basic banking services in its product line, providing a “public option” in banking:

[R]oughly 9 million Americans don’t have a bank account and 21 million rely largely on fringe financial services like usurious check cashers rather than traditional financial institutions. Giving low-income people access to a safe banking system will firm up their economic futures.

The Proud, Forgotten History of Postal Banking

Banking in post offices is not new.  Many countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand, have a long and successful history of it; and so does the United States.

From 1911 to 1967, the U.S. Postal Savings System provided a safe and efficient place for customers to save and transfer funds.  It issued U.S. Postal Savings Bonds in various denominations that paid annual interest, as well as Postal Savings Certificates and domestic money orders.  The U.S. Postal Savings System was set up early in the 20th century to attract the savings of immigrants accustomed to saving at post offices in their native countries, provide safe depositories for people who had lost confidence in private banks, and furnish more convenient depositories for working people than were provided by private banks.  (Post offices were then open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week, substantially longer than bankers’ hours.)  The postal system paid two percent interest on deposits annually.  The minimum deposit was $1 and the maximum was $2,500.  Savings in the system spurted to $1.2 billion during the 1930s and jumped again during World War II, peaking in 1947 at almost $3.4 billion.

The U.S. Postal Savings System was shut down in 1967, not because it was inefficient but because it was considered unnecessary after private banks raised their interest rates and offered the same governmental guarantees that the postal savings system had.

The Kiwibank Model: Postal Banks to Serve Local Communities

Postal banks are now thriving in New Zealand, not as a historical artifact but as a popular new innovation.  When they were instituted in 2002, it was not to save the post office but to save New Zealand families and small businesses from big-bank predators.  By 2001, Australian mega-banks controlled some 80% of New Zealand’s retail banking.  Profits went abroad and were maximized by closing less profitable branches, especially in rural areas.  The result was to place hardships on many New Zealand families and small businesses.

The New Zealand government decided to launch a state-owned bank that would compete with the Aussies.  They called their new bank Kiwibank after their national symbol, the kiwi bird.  But the government team planning the new bank faced major challenges.  How could they keep costs low while still providing services in communities throughout New Zealand?

Their solution was to open bank branches in post offices.  Kiwibank was established as a subsidiary of the government-owned New Zealand Post.  The Kiwibank website states:

Back in 2002, we launched with a thought: New Zealand needs a better banking alternative—a bank that provides real value for money, that has Kiwi values at heart, and that keeps Kiwi money where it belongs—right here, in New Zealand.

So we set up shop in PostShops throughout the country, putting us in more locations than any other bank in New Zealand literally overnight (without wasting millions on new premises!).

Suddenly, New Zealanders had a choice in banking.  In an early “move your money” campaign, they voted with their feet.  In an island nation of only 4 million people, in its first five years Kiwibank attracted 500,000 customers away from the big banks.  It consistently earns the nation’s highest customer satisfaction ratings, forcing the Australia-owned banks to improve their service in order to compete.

Postal Banking Japan-style: Funding the Government’s Debt with Its Own Bank

Another interesting model is Japan Post Bank, now the largest publicly-owned bank in the world.  Japan Post is also the largest holder of personal savings, making it the world’s largest credit engine.  Most money today originates as bank loans, and deposits are the magic pool from which this credit-money is generated.  Japan Post uses its excess credit power to buy government bonds.  By 2007, it was the holder of one-fifth of the nation’s debt.  As noted by Joe Weisenthal, writing in Business Insider in February 2010:

Because Japan’s enormous public debt is largely held by its own citizens, the country doesn’t have to worry about foreign investors losing confidence.

If the U.S. Postal Service were to add commercial banking to its product line, it too could use its own bank-generated credit to help relieve its debt problems. The USPS is being forced to fund the health care costs of its employees for 75 years into the future, and a large portion of this unreasonable burden is composed of interest charges.  According to German researcher Margrit Kennedy, interest composes on average about 40% of the cost of all goods and services. That suggests that eliminating interest could reduce the USPS debt by about 40%.  If the USPS became a bank, it could use the credit generated from customer deposits either to service its own debt directly—something that would effectively be interest-free, since it would own the bank and would get the profits back—or by buying interest-bearing government bonds.  The interest earned on the bonds could then be used to pay the interest on the USPS debt.

Other government agencies and local governments could improve their balance sheets in the same way.  Public institutions with sizeable capital and revenues can cut their infrastructure costs by about 40% by establishing their own banks, allowing them to avoid a massive toll in interest to private banker middlemen.

The Post Office Deserves to Be Preserved

The U.S. Postal Service is a venerable institution that is older than the Constitution.  It should be saved, and it can be saved.  One way is to support HR 1351, a bill introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts to repeal the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act.

Another way is for the post office to combine mail services with teller services, restoring the Postal Savings System of an earlier era.  The result could be not only to save the Post Office but to establish a competitive alternative to a runaway Wall Street banking monopoly that even Congress seems unable to control.

Since March 11, local people, long skilled in farming this verdant and fertile region, have added expert knowledge in radiation to their library of stored knowledge, and the persimmons are deemed unsafe; irradiated by the releases from the stricken nuclear plant at Fukushima-Daiichi, 25km south of here.  I am told the dried fruit, until now a local specialty, has particularly high levels of radioactive contamination.

As we drove through the glistening mountains I watched the readings of the omnipresent dosimeter dangling casually from the rearview mirror of Hiroyuki’s car first oscillate, then grow alarmingly.  Arriving in front of a children’s summer camp, and quietly handed a face mask, an ominous beeping sound began as the readings peaked above 1 micro-sievert per hour, corroborated by a second dosimeter brought by Yuuki to check the calibration.  We pass an old local incinerator at work burning refuse and the numbers spike again.

Once confined to nuclear facilities and university laboratories, the people of Fukushima prefecture have become amateur radiologists, tracking radiation from place to place as wind and rain transport it around in random patterns across the local landscape.

Worried and angry because they have not received accurate information from the Japanese government about the radiation threat and because they want the government to evacuate more affected areas, the people of Fukushima have had to take matters into their own hands.  The government’s own recently released Interim Report on the causes and lessons of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster highlights how poorly information was provided, “The following tendency was observed: transmission and public announcement of information on urgent matter(s) was delayed, press releases were withheld, and explanations were kept ambiguous. Whatever the reasons behind (this), such tendency was hardly appropriate, in view of communication in an emergency.”

According to the people of Fukushima, this tendency is continuing, especially now that Prime Minister Noda announced that the nuclear crisis has “been resolved”.

In Fukushima city the people are organizing to protect and monitor themselves.  In a slightly surreal experience, I am directed to one of the many Meccas to Japanese consumerism that are a feature of every town. But rather than shopping, inside the mall I am taken to the recently set-up Citizens Radioactivity Measuring Station.  Just inside are neatly arranged slippers, children’s toys and a blackboard.  Behind the counter there’s equipment to test food for radiation as well as a whole body counter where children and adults come by daily to check their body’s radiation levels.  It’s run almost entirely by volunteers who have received radiological health training from a French NGO and is free for anyone below the age of 20.

On entering an apartment building in Fukushima city, in contrast to your usual art work, neat hand-written columns of radiation levels are posted in the foyer. Data collected every seven days from the surrounding area shows fluctuating radiation levels; particularly high readings are circled in red.

The cows have been evacuated from here but apparently beyond the 20km compulsory evacuation zone it’s deemed safe for humans, even small and growing ones.  Hiroyuki, an employee at a children’s non-profit turned public health activist, evacuated his wife and four year old daughter first to Tokyo, then Kyoto.  He now sees them just once per month as he has stayed to ensure that the national and regional government takes the health risks of the people here seriously.  He is part of a growing campaign by the newly formed organization Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation, to get the government to reverse its new radiation guidelines, evacuate more people from high radiation levels, especially children, and provide support for those who have voluntarily evacuated.

Radiation from the three severely damaged reactors that suffered explosions and core meltdowns at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant complex has spread far and wide. Apart from evacuating those within a 20 km radius, the government raised the allowable radiation does twenty times, from the internationally recognized 1mSv/year to 20.  This means that anywhere over 0.6 micro sieverts/h, an amount previously limited to people working in “radiologically controlled areas”, is no longer cause for evacuation, radically depressing the numbers of evacuees.

Even though the emergency evacuation centers are said to be “temporary”, it is likely that thousands of the 110,000 people who have been evacuated, in particular those from around Fukushima-Daiichi and downwind of the radioactive plume, will never be able to return to their former homes due to long-lived radioisotopes contaminating the ground, food and water.  Indeed, the Interim Report concludes with “bearing in mind that many people are still obliged to spend restricted life in evacuation for a long period of time, suffering from radiation contamination or fears of health due to exposure, contaminated air, soils, water and food.”

Even before the report, some people I met are now referring to themselves as the “Fukushima Diaspora” rather than “evacuees” because they don’t believe they will ever be able to return.

We arrive in the small community of Isobe on the coast.  Or at least, what remains of Isobe.  We are met by Toshiko Kooriki at her new temporary housing, orderly rows of small prefabricated living quarters.  She takes us to see the stubby concrete remnants of her original house. They jut a couple of feet up from the barren moonscape that was once a small close-knit community of 400 families just inland from where the tsunami hit.  She points out the different rooms and tells us that she comes here from time to time and cries.

Japan, long a study in contrasts, yields another as we meet Hatsumi Terashima, a fisherman for 54 years though he is no longer a fisherman.

Hatsuma Terashima recounts his experience with the tsunami, standing inside all that is left of his house.  The flat expanse of mud in the background is where the rest of the village used to be. He lost two of his grandchildren, a son, his son’s wife and his mother-in-law in the tsunami.

Immediately after the earthquake, he was inside rearranging fallen items when the tsunami struck.  Due to the shape of the land, there is an old saying in Isobe that no tsunami could hit here.  In disbelief, he watched as a dark wall of water rushed toward him and he was dragged 3km inland by the first wave.  His knee broken, a rope caught Hatsumi and he was heaved to safety, unlike five of his family members who were among the 264 who perished.  But he can’t fish because the ocean here is too radioactive.  He passes his time on the sea catching not fish but rubble and other detritus left by the crushing force of the tsunami.

Iatate, a town directly in the path of the radiation plume but outside of the 20km zone, has been evacuated as a high radiation area.  However, this was done only after the heaviest radioactive releases from the initial explosions because the government’s computerized radiation early-warning system, set up specifically for this purpose, the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, (SPEEDI) was down as “communication links were disrupted and inoperative due to the earthquakes, and the SPEEDI could not receive the basic source term information of discharged radioactivity.”

While SPEEDI could have provided some crucial data and helped with a swifter evacuation so that people were not exposed to so much radiation, the information it could have given to local officials and the public to plan evacuations never reached them because

the local NERHQ [Nuclear Emergency Response Head Quarters] lost its functionality, the Government NERHQ or NISA [Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency] should have taken the role of providing the SPEEDI results to the public. But none of them had the idea of making use of this information. MEXT [Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology], the competent ministry for SPEEDI, did not come to realize to providing the SPEEDI information to the public by themselves or through the Government NERHQ.

As we pass through Iatate on our way back from Soma, the town lies silent and dark.  The only lights are from streetlamps and the still occupied old people’s home, housing those too old and vulnerable to be safely moved, cared for by workers on strict shift rotations.

We stop outside the town’s high school.  Inside the car, the readings have ranged from 0.14 micro-sieverts/hour to 1.8.  We step outside and Yuuki and Hiroyuki bend down to train their Geiger counters on the soil; the displays jump to six micro-sieverts per hour.

Despite the devastation and loss of life caused by the earthquake and tsunami, the people I meet in Fukushima prefecture, rather than talk of the those events, discuss radiation levels and how their land has become polluted with an invisible, enduring danger and made the people fearful as the government tries to convince them that it is safe.

Japan is often portrayed abroad as probably the country most capable and prepared to deal with a nuclear accident.  Yet reading the government-ordered Interim Report, I came away with the clear impression that the agencies responsible for emergency planning had made a whole set of false assumptions which led to mistakes that increased the severity of the crisis and people’s exposure to radiation, and there were a series of operational errors at the plant itself as well as communication breakdowns and general lack of planning. It is highly critical of the emergency preparedness, the actions of TEPCO and the improper use of SPEEDI.

Along with many other operational and emergency response failings, according to the report NISA staff, for example, were not even dispatched to TEPCO’s headquarters to gather information in order to report effectively to the prime minister and the country, even though TEPCO is just down the street from METI and NISA offices.  In echoes of the preparedness of BP to cope with the Gulf Oil Spill, measures by TEPCO to protect their nuclear plants from tsunamis were only “voluntary”, so, off course, being a capitalist entity run in the interests of profit rather than safety, they didn’t take them: “TEPCO did not implement measures against tsunami as part of its AM [Roadmap of Accident Management] strategy. Its preparedness for such accident as severe damage at the core of reactor as a result of natural disasters was quite insufficient.”

In a male-dominated society – only 10% of the Japanese Diet is women, strong female leadership of the movement against the government and nuclear utility, TEPCO, is distinctly noticeable.  In one of the many meetings that I attend organized around the radiation and evacuation of children, I spoke with a group of women who have decided to stay for jobs and the stability of their families but who are wracked by anger at the government and frightened of the consequences of their decision to stay.

One woman, who would only give her name as Nihonmatsu, the town she is from, for apprehension of recrimination for continuing to raise the issue of radiation in Fukushima city, has started meetings for people she trusts to talk about their experiences and strategize actions.  She shows me her government issued papers and radiation monitor.  A long and detailed form, she is daily required to fill out the many boxes with the movements and food intake of her daughter.  When complete, she will mail it back to the government for analysis, along with the dosimeter that her daughter is required to keep on her at all times.  Nihonmatsu asks, “If it’s so safe here in Fukushima, why did the government give us these?”

A second woman, Jinko Mera, who gives her age as “about 50” nods in agreement, “We always have to think about how much radiation our food has.  We want to live free from that.  And the healthiest food is from your own region but we can’t dry persimmons, we can’t eat our peaches, we cannot eat our own food.”

At another organizing meeting on Christmas Day, women lead a discussion of the October sit-in outside the ministry of economy, trade and industry, METI, which contains the Japanese nuclear regulatory body, NISA.

Amidst speeches and reminiscences, we watch the 1983 documentary Carry Greenham Home, about the 19 year women’s peace camp and occupation of the US nuclear missile base at Greenham Common, England.  A new generation of women half a world away are inspired by the songs and collective battle of a different type of anti-nuclear struggle.  They want the government to protect them and their families from the immediate nuclear crisis, but they also don’t want anyone else to go through what they are enduring. They are part of a new campaign to permanently close down all 54 nuclear reactors and eradicate nuclear power from Japanese shores.

According to a recent report by Greenpeace (Japan) and the Tokyo-based Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, Japan could generate 43% of its energy requirements from renewable sources by 2020, easily surpassing and making redundant the 30% that is currently provided by nuclear power (though only 6 of the 54 reactors are currently operational).  With Japan in radical population decline, set to shrink from 125 million people to 100 million by 2050, the only impediment to a sane and safe energy policy is therefore political.

The meeting of activists ends with emotional intensity and spirit as attendees gather in a circle to hold hands and sing; evocative of another circle all those years ago, when 30,000 women formed a ring around the nine mile perimeter of Greenham Common air base and said, They Shall Not Pass.  We sing Furosato, a Japanese song of longing and remembrance:

Someday when I have done what I set out to do,
I will return to where I used to have my home.
Lush and green are the mountains of my homeland.
Pure and clear is the water of my old country home.

The next demonstration of the women of Fukushima is already planned, one bus almost full with exhortations to bring friends and fill more.  On the 28th of December, the people of Fukushima will march once more.

So said 64-year-old Chieko Shiina, a member of the group Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation and a traditional farmer from Miyagi Prefecture, in reference to nuclear radiation, as I sat inside the tent on the floor across from her on Day 102 of the sit-in.  In years gone by she would have been 100 miles north on her farm tending her crops and doing such things as fermenting rice to make sake, harvesting leaves to make tea or manufacturing tatami mats.  However, her farm, in southern Miyagi Prefecture is just north of Fukushima and so, while Chieko’s farm is not in an evacuation area, it is too heavily contaminated with radiation for her to farm or sell her products: “I cannot let people eat these things.”

The tent encampment where we met is directly outside the Tokyo headquarters of METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) and began on September 11, the six month anniversary of the combined disasters of the March 11 genpatsu shinsai, a new term that combines a catastrophic quake with a nuclear disaster. Mothers from Fukushima traveled to Tokyo and launched the sit-in with the slogan “We Stood Up to Sit Down,” as they demanded that the Japanese government provide accurate information on the levels of radiation, better protection, and expansion of the evacuation zone for their children.

Over the last three months, the sit-in has become an organizing hub for the anti-nuclear people’s resistance in Japan as well as other protest movements against free trade agreements, the American military base in Okinawa, and the movement to stop any alteration of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution that prevents Japanese troops from being deployed offensively beyond the shores of Japan.  For these reasons, the camp has been regularly targeted for harassment by groups from the Japanese Right.

While large protests of delegations from Fukushima and around the country occur regularly, Chieko is there full-time, braving the elements and frigid temperatures of winter time Tokyo.  She intends to continue the encampment for 10 months and 10 days, the length of time that Japanese traditionally consider that a mother carryies a child as she believes that “the style of fighting should be derived from life” and “that is why it is 10 months and 10 days.”  Emblazoned across the top of one of the many hand-outs at the camp is her slogan: “Women are Pregnant with the Future.”

Another woman I met there, Hisako Tsuruta, told me why she had joined the sit-in: “I am 73 years old, but I can still move and I can still walk.  I need to act before I perish.  I have been building this society of destruction and pollution since the Second World War and I didn’t say anything before, so I am responsible.  Now I must make change.”

Echoing the language of the Occupy Movement, [a large banner at the encampment proclaims “We are the 99%”], Hisako was keen to make broader connections to environmental and social problems that could only be solved by the people acting in unison:

We are all the same, people cannot eat, don’t have jobs, there’s money for war but not people.  Within ourselves we have the power to solve these problems.  With people’s collaboration we can do anything; politicians should leave these problems to us to solve.  People are making the connections and so there is hope in the world.  Before, the image of Fukushima women was quiet, not emotional, now they start to stand up – and sat in.  Even if we lose, we must resist.

The theme of resistance was in the air at a meeting I attended between government representatives of NISA and METI and environmental organizations such as Green Action, Friends of the Earth (Japan) and the Citizens Nuclear Information Center, (CNIC).  Over 150 people, representing 125 organizations had endorsed two demands and were there to grill the government functionaries about cracked pipes between the reactors and the coolant system at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.

As a result of scheduled maintenance, safety concerns and popular protests, only 8 of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan are currently operational and producing power.  Due to energy conservation efforts, there are nevertheless no blackouts.  This fact had not escaped the people in the room, who questioned what the need for any nuclear power was if, through a combination of energy conservation and a switch to clean, renewable energy, nuclear power in Japan, which previously supplied over 30% of electrical demand, could easily be made entirely redundant.  The room broke into strong applause when Ryoichi Hattori, Social Democrat member of the House of Representatives, came to the microphone to ask why this summer, rather than restarting any reactors, they couldn’t all be shut down and the Japanese people would see how they could live without any nuclear power.

Despite this, the government and NISA is pushing to restart some of the reactors early next year after completion of “stress tests” that they claim will show that the reactors are safe to operate, even in the event of another earthquake.  Environmental and other concerned citizen groups contend that the stress tests are based on a faulty and potentially fatal premise: that the earthquake itself did not cause pipes to crack and release steam and radiation, even before the tsunami hit.

Activists were there to present their two demands and provide evidence to back up their claim that pipes were indeed damaged by the earthquake, thereby invalidating the basis of the stress tests which are based on reactor earthquake-resistance analysis that rules out pipe damage from the earthquake.  If the stress tests on the reactors that the government wants to restart are without foundation and based on incorrect analysis, then none of the idled nuclear plants should be restarted.

The backdrop to the discussion and contributing to the tension in the air and the intensity of the meeting is the continuing disaster at Fukushima that has so negatively impacted the 80,000 evacuees and led to Chieko being forced from her farm, as well as those who are still trying to live nearby outside the official evacuation area but are scared of the radiation and unsure of whether it’s actually safe for themselves or their children.

Three reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi are now known to have suffered meltdowns of the highly radioactive fuel rods, with the strong possibility of some fuel melting through the inner containment vessel and pooling on the reactor floor.  Elevated radiation levels have shown up in food staples such as rice and milk in Fukushima prefecture, an area known for its agriculture and a significant farming region of Japan as radiation vented to the atmosphere when hydrogen explosions blew the roofs off two of the reactor buildings after the reactors lost electricity and therefore coolant.

Radioactive plutonium, the most toxic element known to humanity and one that does not exist on earth – it is only manufactured inside nuclear reactors as part of the fission of the uranium fuel – [EPA states: "Plutonium is considered a man-made element, although scientists have found trace amounts of naturally occurring plutonium produced under highly unusual geologic circumstances." -- Ed.] has been detected far from the plant itself, indicating beyond doubt that the inner and outer containment structures have been ruptured and the core of at least one reactor has been exposed.  The dumping of vast quantities of radioactively contaminated water into the oceans has also occurred as workers at the plant struggled to prevent further explosions by keeping the fuel rods cool and were forced to release the largest ever amounts of radiation into the sea when they ran out of storage space.  As the plants are still leaking, groundwater continues to become contaminated and because of the extremely high levels of radiation inside the plant and all of the wrecked equipment it’s still impossible to know the full extent of the damage to the cores and how badly melted they are.  Despite this, the new Japanese Prime Minister Noda declared on December 16 that the reactors were now stable and in “cold shutdown” and the nuclear crisis had “been resolved” which brought heavy editorial criticism from the Japan Times under the title “Nuclear Crisis Far From Resolved.”

Hence, the two demands at the meeting were that there should be no publishing of a report on the accident until all of the facts were collected, and secondly, that until the government knows the exact causes of the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plants, they should not restart any of the inactive nuclear reactors around the country.

Local activist groups are also pushing for an enlarged evacuation zone and better compensation for those forced to relocate and who have lost their jobs along with their homes.  The four hour meeting grew increasingly fractious as it became apparent that the government bureaucrats were not in a position to relay any fresh information or answer any questions from the floor.

The meeting brought strong reminders of a similar meeting in New York in late spring that I attended between community members and the US’s equivalent of NISA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  At that meeting, 600 attendees grew increasingly enraged by the lack of real information or space for dialogue from NRC representatives until local activists took over the meeting and ran it in a democratic manner where people were allowed to present evidence against the 36 year old Indian Point nuclear power plant and finally have a say in how energy would, or would not, be produced in their community.

After one ministerial representative had repeatedly read aloud the exact same non-answer to people’s questioning, Ryoichi Hattori demanded that he be replaced by someone who could answer the people’s questions as they had the right to be informed.

A lower level bureaucrat was replaced, another quickly came in and eventually it was admitted that the government cannot confirm whether the pipes were cracked by the earthquake, nor can they rule out that the cracks were made worse by the tsunami.  Not at all to the reassurance of anyone there, the new bureaucrat said that this was partly because the government had not yet received all of the necessary information from the plant’s operator and owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the infamous TEPCO, and that they were not sure that they would get all of the information in the future.

In Japan, the term “nuclear energy village” refers to the tight connections between the government, the government’s regulatory body, NISA and nuclear corporations such as TEPCO which, to all intents and purposes, regulate themselves, a point highlighted by a New York Times investigative report detailing the “culture of complicity” and corruption by TEPCO at Fukushima-Daiichi that undermined safety at the plant.

As the Japanese government seeks to sweep the nuclear disaster under the rug, and maintain Japan’s dependence on nuclear energy, continuing to put the Japanese people, who live on a volcanically and geologically active island in tremendous danger, it is clear that only the combined pressure of valiant fighters like Chieko Shiina will force the government to rethink its pro-corporate energy policy and move Japan toward a renewable and safe energy future.  As she told me, “it’s human nature to fight.  And this fight is international.  The actions to change the system make you change.  Both are important and necessary.  This unequal power structure will lead to change, but we must fight”.

Tomorrow, I travel to Fukushima to spend Christmas in the radiation zone, speaking with those most directly affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

The leaders of the nine countries that are part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hawaii and agreed on the broad outlines of a free trade agreement. The current members include the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Peru and Chile. The TPP has been hailed as a, “landmark, 21st-century trade agreement, setting a new standard for global trade and incorporating next-generation issues.” Key features of the TPP are that it would provide comprehensive market access and be a fully regional agreement designed to facilitate the development of production and supply chains. Various working groups have been discussing issues such as financial services, government procurement, intellectual property, investment, rules of origin, telecommunications and trade remedies. The next round of talks will take place in December and there are hopes of concluding negotiations before the end of 2012. Apart from Canada and Mexico, Japan has also expressed interest in being part of the TPP. The door is also open for other countries to join which is why many consider it to be a building block for an Asia-Pacific free trade zone.

Following the APEC forum, President Barack Obama held a bilateral meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Originally, it was scheduled to be a North American Leaders Summit, but Mexican President Felipe Calderon could not attend due to the death of Interior Minister Francisco Blake Mora. According to a Readout by the Press Secretary, the leaders look forward to a rescheduled trilateral summit. During his meeting with Prime Minister Harper, President Obama, “noted the important progress being made on the Beyond the Border and Regulatory Cooperation initiatives.” He invited Harper to Washington in early December where an action plan that would work towards a North American security perimeter could finally be released. Both leaders also discussed the announcement by the State Department to seek additional information regarding the Keystone XL Pipeline project. A final ruling on the pipeline which would carry oil from western Canada to the gulf coast of Texas will not be made until after the November 2012 presidential election. The move has prompted Canada to further diversify its trade ties and shift its focus on the Asia-Pacific region.

The decision by Japan to begin consultations with TPP countries, followed by the news that Canada and Mexico are also seeking to join negotiations, has given the trade agreement a real boost. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk welcomed their interest and stated, “Along with Japan’s similar announcement this week, the desire of these North American nations to consult with TPP partners demonstrates the broadening momentum and dynamism of this ambitious effort toward economic integration across the Pacific.” Minister of International Trade Ed Fast reaffirmed Canada’s commitment to advancing economic interests in the Asia-Pacific region. He acknowledged, “We recognize the TPP as a means to further strengthen those ties and contribute to what promises to become a broadly-based vehicle for economic integration in the region.” The report, “Canada, China, and Rising Asia: A Strategic Proposal,” released in October, recommended joining the TPP as the most efficient way to deepen integration with other Asian economies, providing that the Canadian government reforms the supply management system.

Canada has previously expressed interest in the TPP, but supply management has proven to be stumbling block. The practice which has been in place for decades sets production quotas for dairy, egg and poultry farmers and protects them with import tariffs. In a recent speech, New Zealand Trade Minister Tim Groser raised questions about Canada’s application to join TPP negotiations. He admitted, “Dairy will be very challenging for Canada. This is a statement of fact. Canada follows a policy that many Governments used to follow but most have moved forward. It is called ‘supply management.’ It is completely inconsistent with tariff elimination.” As far as benchmarks go, Groser confirmed that there are questions that TPP countries will ask when considering new applicants such as whether, “we see clear evidence of a matching commitment to attain a high-quality agreement across all chapters, including the most sensitive matters.” He maintained that, “There is a very strict dress code involved and we are going to be stuffy and old fashioned in enforcing it. When our Leaders said ‘eliminate’ tariffs and other direct barriers to imports, they meant it.” Some have hinted that TPP negotiations could be used to expand NAFTA.

The Harper government maintains that it will promote and defend Canadian interests, but there are concerns that supply management could be used as a bargaining chip to secure a spot in the TPP. In his article, “Is Harper putting dairy and poultry protection on the table in trade talks?,” Steven Chase reported that, “A former senior Canadian trade official said expanding trade with Asia is not the Harper government’s only reason for joining the Trans-Pacific talks.” He goes on to say, “John Weekes, Canada’s chief NAFTA negotiator, said Ottawa can’t afford to be left out of talks that appear to be offering signatories a deeper economic relationship with the U.S. than can be found in the North American free-trade agreement.” Weekes is also quoted as saying, “What we’re talking about here – if it really does become what Obama says it will be – is we’re renegotiating NAFTA in the same way we renegotiated the Canada-U.S. FTA.” Another NAFTA-style agreement poses a serious threat to economic sovereignty. There are fears that U.S. could use the TPP to open up the Canadian telecom market and its banking sector to more foreign financial services.

In his article, “We’re neglecting our North American neighbors,” Robert Pastor described the TPP as a flawed strategy and stressed that the road to completing an agreement would be long. He explained Canada and Mexico’s decision to join the TPP, “as a defensive measure to ensure that they protect what they gained from NAFTA.” He also stated, “Obama should give priority to forging a seamless market with Canada and Mexico. But for the second time in two years, the North American leaders postponed their summit without setting a new date.” Pastor conceded that, “The three leaders have shown little imagination or even interest in dealing with a continental agenda.” He warned how, “the TPP will divert scarce political capital and attention from North America.” Pastor further emphasized that, “The fastest way to create jobs and double exports is for the three governments to work together on continental plans for transportation, education, and infrastructure.” He also added, “If the TPP’s purpose is to put pressure on China to open its market, that won’t work” and instead suggested, “A reinvigorated North America is more likely to get China’s attention.”

Jane Kelsey sheds more light as to the real agenda behind the proposed trade agreement. She acknowledged that it is part of a, “revival of US geopolitical and strategic influence in the Asian region to counter the ascent of China. The US aims to isolate and subordinate China in part through constructing a region-wide legal regime that serves the interests of, and is enforceable by, the US and its corporations.” It is interesting to note that many of the current TPP partners, including new prospective members support U.S. foreign policy initiatives. This ties in nicely with the Obama administration’s plans of expanding alliances and military bases in the Asia-Pacific region in an effort to contain China’s rising power.

The Public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men.

— Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, 1775

As the sabre rattling against Iran becomes more deafening, week on week, with threats of the nuclear insanity of potentially, deliberately, creating a few Chenobyls or a Fukushima by bombing working nuclear power plants, another potential nuclear madness is planned, geographically “next door.”

The IAEA appears to be behaving in as partisan, shameless way regarding Iran as it did with Iraq. Then accusations, with considerable justification, were that the inspection teams were more about spying than neutral observation. “The way back to (the UN) was via Tel Aviv”, remarked one former inspector, memorably.

Gareth Porter has meticulously, comprehensively trashed the IAEA’s latest Report on Iran, showing disturbing parallels with the tragic Iraq fiasco. Iraq had Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and “Curveball”, selling fairy stories. Iran, seemingly, has an expert in nanodiamonds, Vyacheslav Danilenko, apparently doubling as a nuclear weapons expert, and a plethora of unidentified spokespersons for “Member States.” Hardly rigid, verifiable scholarship.

Previous “concerns” expressed have been that Iran has vast oil reserves, so there must be a weapons-related reason to expand nuclear power. However, Iran has been under increasingly stringent sanctions since 14 November 1979, ironically necessitating additional sources of energy – for which it is now being threatened with Iraq’s fate.

Yet headlines in the Middle East warning: “Most volatile region in the world is going nuclear”, one with a helpful map of “volatile” countries with advanced nuclear ambitions,  seem to have escaped IAEA notice. Iran, of course, has no history of belligerence towards its neighbours for decades. Indeed, in 2003, in spite of the terrible cost of the eight year war after the 1980 (Western driven) invasion by Iraq, the world was told by Washington that the country was still a “threat to its neighbours”. Tehran repeatedly responded that it was not.

Consider then the case of Kuwait: “Blessed with an abundance of natural petroleum resources …” (Gulf News 25 February 2011) which has advanced plans for up to four nuclear power stations – two apparently to be built on two islands, Warba and Bubiyan, which have been the source of conflict for nearly a century –  many scholars contend longer – the dispute over which contributed to the disaster of Iraq’s invasion and that country’s subsequent decimation of 2 August 1990.

Theodore Draper outlined the vast complexities in 1993:

The suddenness of the [Iraqi] action [invading Kuwait] and the coverage it has received should not disguise the fact that Iraqi claims to Kuwaiti territory have been pursued with remarkable consistency over the last half-century, through Hashemite and revolutionary rule alike.

There is some justification for the argument (which) predates by a considerable length of time, the accession of Saddam Hussain to the Iraqi Presidency.

These claims will not disappear with a settlement of the present Kuwait Crisis, whether or not this involves a change of regime in Baghdad.

It is necessary to take these historical roots into account because they left such an explosive legacy in the Gulf region—the Iraqi quest for a coastal outlet, the obstruction of the Kuwaiti barrier islands of Warba and Bubiyan, the dispute over Kuwait’s exploitation of the Rumaila oil field, the precarious borders … But as Richard Schofield¹ points out:

Thus there was more to Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait than one man’s evil character. Whatever may happen to him, the Iraqi grievances will not go away.

For more than two centuries, Kuwait managed to survive by playing off one major power against another. As a nation, it did not have the ancient roots that Iraq has in Mesopotamia.

Throughout the 1930s, Iraq refused to agree to a demarcation of the boundary with Kuwait unless the latter was willing to give up control of the islands, Warba and Bubiyan, and thus secure the narrow Iraqi Persian Gulf coastline. Despite its vulnerability, Kuwait refused to make concessions.

By 1935, Iraqi propaganda openly called for the incorporation of Kuwait. Three years later, Iraq made this claim official, with the same justification used by Saddam Hussein five decades later—that Kuwait had once been attached to the Ottoman province of Basra.

Swimming distance from Iraq, which Patrick Markey has described as  “… a flash point, a country still struggling with violence, sectarianism and pressure from neighbours in an unstable region”, $20 Billion is to be spent on the Warba Island nuclear reactor,  just 500 metres from the nearest Iraqi inhabited area, at the port of Umm Qasr. It is 30 miles from Kuwait. (Bubiyan nestles next to Warba.)

Pointing out that it is on the still disputed border between Iraq and Kuwait arising from further boundary tinkering after the 1991 hostilities, Iraqi parliamentarian Ms Alya Nasif has requested of Prime Minister Nuri Maliki that he demands in the strongest terms that plans be halted.

The main contractors are French giant, AREVA, who, in December 2010 the Kuwaiti Investment Authority invested $794 million and Kuwait acquired a 4.8% stake, making it the third largest investor, the French State being the largest. AREVA has extensive contracts and mutual interests with the United States.

Further, in September last year, Kuwait signed “ … a bilateral agreement with Japan for cooperation on the peaceful use of nuclear energy, covering issues such as expertise exchange, human resource development, nuclear safety, following similar deals with France and the US earlier this year.”

The five year deal with Japan, includes:

  … preparation, planning and promotion of nuclear power development … safety and security.

The scope of the cooperation includes training, human resources and infrastructure development, and the appropriate application of nuclear power generation and related technology.

I wonder if Fukushima’s radioactive air borne or sea borne fallout has reached the Gulf yet.

The UK Foreign Office website states of Kuwait:

There is a general threat from terrorism. Attacks cannot be ruled out and could be indiscriminate.  These include references to attacks on Western interests  … military, oil, transport and aviation interests.

What a prize a nuclear power station would be!

Many areas of the Gulf are highly sensitive, including near maritime boundaries and the islands of Bubiyan and Warbah …

Further, reminds the Foreign Office:

The area in the northern Gulf, between Iran, Iraq and Kuwait has not been demarcated …

It would be hard to find a more volatile place to build a nuclear installation. Oh, and the land is low lying and subject to silting and shifting.\

With the IAEA berating Iran for its nuclear programme, it seems bewildering that the very real and present dangers of these terrifying, madcap projects have passed them by.

Heaven forbid that the fifty years fruitful trade relations between Japan and Kuwait, celebrated in May this year, has tempted Japan’s Mr Yukiya Amano, heading the IAEA, to put country before nuclear madness.

And then there are the potential suicide bombers.

1. Islands and Maritime Boundaries in the Gulf   1798-1960, pub: 1990:  R Schofield. ISBN: (13) 978-1-85207-275-9

Workers first detected an ammonia leak in a water purification system about 3 p.m. Ammonia, when mixed into air, is toxic. The 30 gallons of ammonia were caught in a holding tank and posed no health risk, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC).

During the 1970s and 1980s, at the peak of the nuclear reactor construction, organized groups of protestors mounted dozens of anti-nuke campaigns. They were called Chicken Littles, the establishment media generally ignored their concerns, and the nuclear industry trotted out numerous scientists and engineers from their payrolls to declare nuclear energy to be safe, clean, and inexpensive energy that could reduce America’s dependence upon foreign oil.

Workers at nuclear plants are highly trained, probably far more than workers in any other industry; operating systems are closely regulated and monitored. However, problems caused by human negligence, manufacturing defects, and natural disasters have plagued the nuclear power industry for its six decades.

It isn’t alerts like what happened at San Onofre that are the problem; it’s the level 3 (site area emergencies) and level 4 (general site emergencies) disasters. There have been 99 major disasters, 56 of them in the U.S., since 1952, according to a study conducted by Benjamin K. Sovacool Director of the Energy Justice Program at Institute for Energy and Environment  One-third of all Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.

At Windscale in northwest England, fire destroyed the core, releasing significant amounts of Iodine-131. At Rocky Flats near Denver, radioactive plutonium and tritium leaked into the environment several times over a two decade period. At Church Rock, New Mexico, more than 90 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Rio Puerco, directly affecting the Navajo nation.

In the grounds of central and northeastern Pennsylvania, in addition to the release of radioactive Cesium-137 and Iodine-121, an excessive level of Strontium-90 was released during the Three Mile Island (TMI) meltdown in 1979, the same year as the Church Rock disaster. To keep waste tanks from overflowing with radioactive waste, the plant’s operator dumped several thousand gallons of radioactive waste into the Susquehanna River. An independent study by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina revealed the incidence of lung cancer and leukemia downwind of the TMI meltdown within six years of the meltdown was two to ten times that of the rest of the region.

At the Chernobyl meltdown in April 1986, about 50 workers and firefighters died lingering and horrible deaths from radiation poisoning. Because of wind patterns, about 27,000 persons in the northern hemisphere are expected to die of cancer, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. An area of about 18 miles is uninhabitable. The nuclear reactor core is now protected by a crumbling sarcophagus; a replacement is not complete. Even then, the new shield is expected to crumble within a century. The current director at Chernobyl says it could be 20,000 years until the area again becomes habitable.

In March, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale and the ensuing 50-foot high tsunami wave led to a meltdown of three of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency reported that 31 radioactive isotopes were released. In contrast, 16 radioactive isotopes were released from the A-bomb that hit Hiroshima August 6, 1945.  The agency also reported that radioactive cesium released was almost 170 times the amount of the A-bomb, and that the release of radioactive Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 was about two to three times the level of the A-bomb. The release into the air, water, and ground included about 60,000 tons of contaminated water. The half lives of Sr-90 and Cs-137 are about 30 years each. Full effects may not be known for at least two generations. Twenty-three nuclear reactors in the U.S. have the same design—and same design flaws—as the Daiichi reactor.

About five months after the Daiichi disaster, the North Anna plant in northeastern Virginia declared an alert, following a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that was felt throughout the mid-Atlantic and lower New England states. The earthquake caused building cracks and spent fuel cells in canisters to shift. The North Anna plant was designed to withstand an earthquake of only 5.9–6.2 on the Richter scale. More than 1.9 million persons live within a 50-mile radius of North Anna, according to 2010 census data.

Although nuclear plant security is designed to protect against significant and extended forms of terrorism, the NRC believes as many as one-fourth of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants may need upgrades to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters, according to an Associated Press investigation. About 20 percent of the world’s 442 nuclear plants are built in earthquake zones, according to data compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NRC has determined that the leading U.S. plants in the Eastern Coast in danger of being compromised by an earthquake are in the extended metropolitan areas of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chattanooga. Tenn. The highest risk, however, may be California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, both built near major fault lines. Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, was even built by workers who misinterpreted the blueprints.

Every nuclear spill affects not just those in the immediate evacuation zone but people throughout the world, as prevailing winds can carry air-borne radiation thousands of miles from the source, and the world’s water systems can put radioactive materials into the drinking supply and agriculture systems of most nations. At every nuclear disaster, the governments eventually declare the immediate area safe. But animals take far longer than humans to return to the area. If they could figure out that radioactivity released into the water, air, and ground are health hazards, certainly humans could also figure it out.

Following the disaster at Daiichi, Germany announced it was closing its 17 nuclear power plants and would expand development of solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources. About the same time, Siemens abandoned financing and building nuclear power plants, leaving only American-based Westinghouse and General Electric, which own, or have constructed, about four-fifths of the world’s nuclear plants, and the French-based Areva.

The life of the first nuclear plants was about 30–40 years; the newer plants have a 40–60 year life. After that time, they become so radioactive that the risk of radiation poison outweighs the benefits of continuing the operation. So the operators seal the plant and abandon it, carefully explaining to the public the myriad safety procedures in place and the federal regulations. The cooling and decommissioning takes 50–100 years until the plant is safe enough for individuals to walk through it without protection. More critical, there still is no safe technology of how to handle spent control rods.

The United States has no plans to abandon nuclear energy. The Obama administration has proposed financial assistance to build the first nuclear plant in three decades, and a $36 billion loan guarantee for the nuclear industry. However, the Congressional Budget Office believes there can be as much as 50 percent default.  Each plant already receives $1–1.3 billion in tax rebates and subsidies. However, in the past three years, plans to build nuclear generators have been abandoned in nine states, mostly because of what the major financiers believe to be a less than desired return on investment and higher than expected construction and maintenance costs.

A Department of Energy analysis revealed the budget for 75 of the first plants was about $45 billion, but cost overruns ran that to $145 billion. The last nuclear power plant completed was the Watts Bar plant in eastern Tennessee. Construction began in 1973 and was completed in 1996. Part of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, the Watts Bar plant cost about $8 billion to produce 1,170 mw of energy from its only reactor. Work on a second reactor was suspended in 1988 because of a lack of need for additional electricity. However, construction was resumed in 2007, with completion expected in 2013. Cost to complete the reactor, which was about 80 percent complete when work was suspended, is estimated to cost an additional $2.5 billion.

The cost to build new power plants is well over $10 billion each, with a proposed cost of about $14 billion to expand the Vogtle plant near Augusta, Ga. The first two units had cost about $9 billion.

Added to the cost of every plant is decommissioning costs, averaging about $300 million to over $1 billion, depending upon the amount of energy the plant is designed to produce. The nuclear industry proudly points to studies that show the cost to produce energy from nuclear reactors is still less expensive than the costs from coal, gas, and oil. The industry also rightly points out that nukes produce about one-fifth all energy, with no emissions, such as those from the fossil fuels.

For more than six decades, this nation essentially sold its soul for what it thought was cheap energy that may not be so cheap, and clean energy that is not so clean.

It is necessary to ask the critical question. Even if there were no human, design, and manufacturing errors; even if there could be assurance there would be no accidental leaks and spills of radioactivity; even if there became a way to safely and efficiently dispose of long-term radioactive waste; even if all of this were possible, can the nation, struggling in a recession while giving subsidies to the nuclear industry, afford to build more nuclear generating plants at the expense of solar, wind, and geothermal energy?

See Part 1, 2, and 3.

See Part 1 and 2.