Dolphin: Fukushima Disaster Was Man-Made Before and After — Collusion and Corruption Across Government and Industry and Media…

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Analysis, Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Media

Fukushima Disaster Was Man-Made, Investigation Finds

The Fukushima nuclear disaster was the result of “man-made” failures before and after last year’s earthquake, according to a report from an independent parliamentary investigation.

The breakdowns involved regulators working with the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. to avoid implementing safety measures as well as a government lacking commitment to protect the public, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission said in the report.

The March 11 accident, which set off a wave of reactor safety investigations around the world, “cannot be regarded as a natural disaster,” the commission’s chairman, Tokyo University professor emeritus Kiyoshi Kurokawa, wrote in the report released yesterday in Tokyo. It “could and should have been foreseen and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response.”

The report dealt the harshest critique yet to Tokyo Electric (9501) and the government. The findings couldn’t rule out the possibility that the magnitude-9 earthquake damaged the Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 1 reactor and safety equipment. This is a departure from other reports that concluded the reactors withstood the earthquake, only to be disabled when the ensuing tsunami slammed into the plant.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Dolphin: Fukushima Disaster Was Man-Made Before and After — Collusion and Corruption Across Government and Industry and Media…”

2012/06/302012/06/30

Tom Atlee: Derivatives as Fatal Cancer Discussion and Links

03 Economy, Commerce, Corruption, Government

http://tom-atlee.posterous.com/derivatives-challenge-citizenship-and-economi
Short URL: http://post.ly/83Ojt

Dear friends,

I'm interested in derivatives as a symbol of an economic system that's NOT based on productivity that satisfies real human needs. Derivatives are contracts that shift risk from players who are risk averse (and want insurance against loss) to players who have an appetite for risk (and want a big gambling win).* While originally intended to serve much like an insurance policy, they have turned into a tool for high-stakes gambling that puts everyone else at risk.

The speculative market in financial derivatives is – depending on whose estimate you read – THREE to TWENTY (or more) times bigger than the whole global economy – way bigger than the GDP of the entire world. Derivatives are a very big part of what is called “the casino economy”. Financial speculation is basically gambling that the value of something – commodities, stocks, currency, whatever – will go up or down. The casino economy is not about producing or financing real goods or services.* It is about making lots of money for the successful gamblers.

The rest of us could let them go ahead and gamble except for two things. First, many of them use the money they get to buy more influence and power, making a mockery of “the free market” and “democratic self-governance”. Secondly, the wrong sequence of bad guesses, responses and glitches in this highly computerized money-making game could wipe out the global economy that the rest of us depend on. We are still stumbling from the last global financial crash in 2008 – in which derivatives played a major role. But far bigger crashes are possible.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Derivatives as Fatal Cancer Discussion and Links”

2012/06/252012/06/25

John Steiner: Genetic Foods – Transparency, Truth, & Trust versus Tyranny, Toxicity, & Theft

07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Knowledge

Genetic Engineers Explain Why GE Food Is Dangerous

Nation of Change, Sunday 24 June 2012

One of the report¹s authors, Dr. Michael Antoniou of King¹s College London School of Medicine in the UK, uses genetic engineering for medical applications but warns against its use in developing crops for human food and animal feed.

Aren¹t critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn¹t the debate over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between emotional but ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting scientists on the other?

A report released June 17, GMO Myths and Truths, challenges these claims. The report presents a large body of peer-reviewed scientific and other authoritative evidence of the hazards to health and the environment posed by genetically engineered crops and organisms.

Unusually, the initiative for the report came not from campaigners but from two genetic engineers, who believe there are good scientific reasons to be wary of GM foods and crops.

Continue reading “John Steiner: Genetic Foods – Transparency, Truth, & Trust versus Tyranny, Toxicity, & Theft”

2012/06/242012/06/24

Josh Kilbourn: Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us

03 Economy, 12 Water, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government

Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us

Abrahm Lustgarten

ProPublica, 21 June 2012

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

Injection-Wells-Class1 — Click on Image to Enlarge

There are growing signs they were mistaken.

Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.

In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami's drinking water.

There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.

Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves — from which most Americans get their drinking water — remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.

But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.

Read full article.

2012/06/242012/06/24

Marcus Aurelius: 8,000 Wealthy US Citizens Leaving US and Renouncing US Citizenship

03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

Wealthy Americans Jumping Obama’s Ship

NewsMax, Sunday, 24 Jun 2012 12:46 PM

Wealthy Americans aren’t just leaving tax-heavy states like New York and California, they’re leaving the country.

U.S. citizens are defecting at record levels in order to escape high taxes, the New York Post reported. About 8,000 U.S. citizens are projected to renounce their citizenship in 2012, or about 154 a week — versus 3,805 in 2011, or about 73 per week, according to immigration officials, the Post reported.

They want to avoid tax bills resulting from the proposed 55-percent hike on the wealthy and the anticipated expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts at the end of the year, the Post reported.

“High-net-worth individuals are making decisions that having a US passport just isn’t worth the cost anymore,” Jim Duggan, a lawyer at Duggan Bertsch, which specializes in protecting assets of the wealthy, told the Post.

“They’re able to do what they do from any place in the world, and they’re choosing to do it from places with much lower tax rates,” he said. “Some are philosophically disgusted at the course our country is taking in all kinds of ways. They’re making a strong protest of, ‘Enough is enough.’ But largely it’s an economic decision.”

But to leave means finding a new country and obtaining citizenship and there are many that are eager to welcome wealthy Americans, such as Australia, Norway, Singapore, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, and Antigua, according to the Post.

These countries tend to offer a fast track to citizenship and protections from the Justice Department and IRS.

2012/06/212016/03/25

Chuck Spinney: Progressives Argue Over Defeating Obama – a Conversation on Email

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Most of my liberal friends reluctantly support President Obama's re-election, because the alternative is so much worse. Invariably, they invoke the effects of a Romney presidency on judicial appointments, especially those to the Supreme Court (ironically, Obama's two appointees just voted with the majority to decline to hear the Guantanamo case, if effect, putting another nail in the coffin that is burying habeas corpus). For those few still on the fence, the attached article by one of the President's former law professors provides useful food for thought.

Chuck Spinney

San Remo, Italy

JUNE 20, 2012Obama's Former Law Prof Declares: “Obama has failed the progressive cause.”Why Obama Must be Defeatedby RUSSELL MOKHIBERNot Ralph Nader. Not Amy Goodman. Not Noam Chomsky. Not Chris Hedges. Not Cornel West. Not Alexander Cockburn. Not one of the great left critics in the United States have dared say what Harvard Law School Professor Roberto Unger said last week. “President Obama must be defeated in the coming election.”In 1976, at age 29, Roberto Unger became the youngest tenured professor at Harvard Law School. Obama took two classes from Unger – Jurisprudence and Reinventing Democracy. During the 2008 campaign, Unger was reportedly in frequent contact with candidate Barack Obama via email and Blackberry.But here he is today saying that “President Obama must be defeated in the coming election.”

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Progressives Argue Over Defeating Obama – a Conversation on Email”

2012/06/21

William Pfaff: Financial Oligarchy Buries Constitution Democracy in USA

Commerce, Corruption, Government

Rise of the Managerial Class

Posted on Jun 19, 2012

By William Pfaff

At a time when corporate America is exploring and exploiting its new Supreme-Court-bestowed role in the management of American election results, an earlier transformation in the composition and political role of American business leadership should be recalled. This was the replacement of the Gilded Age capitalists and industrialists—audacious, rapacious and innovative, who created the post-Civil War American industrial economy—by the early 20th-century professional managers who took their place.

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