This is the first of two stories. I am running them both today, because I want to make the point that in nuclear accidents there is a question as to whether they are ever really “over;” this is the thing that is different about nuclear power. Tar sands oil leaks, such as the one in Arkansas, eventually get cleaned up. Nuclear waste is forever.
US residents near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation may be in grave danger: a nuclear safety board found that the underground tanks holding toxic, radioactive waste could explode at any minute, due to a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas.
In addition to everything else Fukushima has shown us the unintended consequence of radioactive tuna. This technology is fine, until it's not fine. Then it's a problem for we know not how many years, and creates horrible social problems.
Phi Beta Iota: The irresponsibility — partly in ignorance but mostly in corruption — of most governments — cannot be understated. The “inudstrialization” of the knowledge industry led to fragementation, a disconnect from ethics, and ultimately to a perversion of how knowledge is used, to internalize profits and externalize hazards, risks, and lasting costs. Very uncivilized.
An international network of journalists has obtained some 2.5 million records from tax havens detailing shell companies, offshore accounts and dubious financial deals. The unprecedented leaks include the names of 130,000 people who at one time or other moved their money offshore.
Oligarchs and dictators' daughters apparently have a penchant for bunkering their assets on the British Virgin Islands. Barons and composers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the Cook Islands. To cheat on taxes, they create bogus firms with imaginative names like Tantris, Moon Crystal or Sequoia.
Those are just a few details published this week on a major global system of tax evasion, which sheds new light on the methods used to deceive fiscal authorities and hide money. In what is believed to be the largest data leak in history, anonymous informants have provided an international consortium of journalists with around 2.5 million documents detailing activities in tax havens around the world.
The virtual Everest of data exposes some 120,000 letterbox entities, offshore accounts and other dubious deals in more than 170 countries, in addition to the names of 140,000 individuals alleged to have placed their money in known tax havens. The list includes politicians, celebrities, weapons dealers, oligarchs, financiers and a very diverse cast of characters. It also includes hundreds of Germans. Reporters at the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper noted that the most famous German featured on the list is society playboy Gunter Sachs, best known abroad as Brigitte Bardot's husband for a brief period in the 1960s, who committed suicide in 2011 at the age of 78.
U.K. businesses waste billions a year on tech investment
According to new research, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the U.K. habitually waste money on IT products and services they don’t need.
IT software provider SolarWinds released a new study today which examines what challenges IT staff face in small and medium businesses this year. Reaching out to 500 firms in the U.K. and Germany, the study found that although IT budgets have remained the same or increased over the last five years in 93 percent of SMEs, over 75 percent of firms are wasting money.
On average, IT employees said that roughly 12 percent of software, once purchased, remained in its box gathering dust. However, in 87 percent of businesses, this figure reached 50 percent. The researchers note that on average, £11,962 is spent on IT management software annually by 4.8 billion U.K. SMEs, and so this can translate into £6.89 billion a year being wasted.
Very interesting analysis, it makes a lot of sense for the BRICS nations to develop an alternative to the corrupt IMF / World Bank. The dollar is surely doomed.
An unstoppable sequence of events has been put into motion finally. The pressure has been building for months. Some themes are plainly evident, except to those who wear rose colored glasses in the US Dome of Perception. The USTreasury Bond will be brought home to the US and British banks, where it will choke its bankers, then be devalued for survival reasons, after a painful isolation. The Chinese and Russians will conspire to finance the Eurasian Trade Zone corridor foundation with USTBonds, held in reserve, put to usage. The British will play a very unusual role, selling out the United States in order to be squires to the Eastern Duo. The process has begun; it cannot be stopped.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The events are already being grossly misinterpreted and minimized in the US press, where devoted lapdogs, artistic swindlers, and creative writers prevail. The Paradigm Shift eastward is showing its next face, with a truly massive trade zone for cooperation and reduced cost overhead as the giant foundation. The Untied States for all of its past hegemony and devious manipulations and vicious attacks, will be excluded. The British will assist in the exclusion in order to avoid the Third World themselves. The following blueprint is the result of years of planning, with steady information and hints and confirmations by at least two Hat Trick Letter sources. The sunset of the USDollar has a blueprint. As a personal embroidery, let me state that this article is the most important the Jackass has ever written. Let it be taken seriously for its grave somber message.
Last week, GAO defended itself, as it should have, at the Foreign Policy website against my criticisms of its latest F-35 report. This week I responded, also at Foreign Policy. In sum, GAO's retort to my article makes me even more concerned about the state of affairs at GAO than I was before. Find my original article, GAO's retort, and my response all at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/03/error_report_ii and below.
Foreign Policy
GAO's defense of its F-35 investigation worries me even more.
BY WINSLOW WHEELER | APRIL 3, 2013
It is important and proper that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) responded tomy criticisms of its March 2013 report on the Defense Department's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Any watchdog agency should jealously defend its competence and independence, especially when the foundations of its oversight come under attack from those with experience, and sources, inside the agency.
The GAO took issue with my article, titled “Error Report,” on three matters.
Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Wednesday, 3. April 2013
Three years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.
Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office's chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.
The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified – and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s DeepwaterHorizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.
Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.
To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.
Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.
However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.
The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you’re dead.
So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.
Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)
Britain's Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)
And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.
The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Bradley Manning.
Manning could have saved their lives
Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.
TED Fellow Eddie Huang was kicked out of the organization for refusing to follow its cult-like orders. WARNING – explicit language.
“I just went through a whole week of people telling me what to do, where to be, and it was like being at a fucking scientology summer camp,” he said. “It was horrible.”
Includes mandated 40-year old roommates, ban on all outside activities including girlfriends, low-rent accommodations. Not allowed to pay for your own private room.
This is the first of two stories. I am running them both today, because I want to make the point that in nuclear accidents there is a question as to whether they are ever really “over;” this is the thing that is different about nuclear power. Tar sands oil leaks, such as the one in Arkansas, eventually get cleaned up. Nuclear waste is forever.
