JUNE 16, 2011, 9:07 PM
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
Tags:
belief, epistemology, Philosophers on the News, Philosophy, religion, the Rapture
In the coming weeks, The Stone will feature occasional posts by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, that apply critical thinking to information and events that have appeared in the news.
Apart from its entertainment value, Harold Camping’s ill-advised prediction of the rapture last month attracted me as a philosopher for its epistemological interest. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, its nature, scope and limits. Camping claimed to know, with certainty and precision, that on May 21, 2011, a series of huge earthquakes would devastate the Earth and be followed by the taking up (rapture) of the saved into heaven. No sensible person could have thought that he knew this. Knowledge requires justification; that is, some rationally persuasive account of why we know what we claim to know. Camping’s confused efforts at Biblical interpretation provided no justification for his prediction. Even if, by some astonishing fluke, he had turned out to be right, he still would not have known the rapture was coming.
The recent failed prediction of the rapture has done nothing to shake the certainty of believers.
Of particular epistemological interest was the rush of Christians who believe that the rapture will occur but specify no date for it to dissociate themselves from Camping. Quoting Jesus’s saying that “of that day and hour no one knows,” they rightly saw their view as unrefuted by Camping’s failed prediction. What they did not notice is that the reasons for rejecting Camping’s prediction also call into question their claim that the rapture will occur at some unspecified future time.
What was most disturbing about Camping was his claim to be certain that the rapture would occur on May 21. Perhaps he had a subjective feeling of certainty about his prediction, but he had no good reasons to think that this feeling was reliable. Similarly, you may feel certain that you will get the job, but this does not make it (objectively) certain that you will. For that you need reasons that justify your feeling.
There are many Christians who are as subjectively certain as Camping about the rapture, except that they do not specify a date. They have a feeling of total confidence that the rapture will someday occur. But do they, unlike Camping, have good reasons behind their feeling of certainty? Does the fact that they leave the date of the rapture unspecified somehow give them the good reason for their certainty that Camping lacked?
An entirely unspecified date has the advantage of making their prediction immune to refutation. The fact that the rapture hasn’t occurred will never prove that it won’t occur in the future. A sense that they will never be refuted may well increase the subjective certainty of those who believe in the rapture, but this does nothing to provide the good reasons needed for objective certainty. Camping, after the fact, himself moved toward making his prediction unrefutable, saying that May 21 had been an “invisible judgment day,” a spiritual rather than a physical rapture. He kept to his prediction of a final, physical end of the world on October 21, 2011, but no doubt this prediction will also be open to reinterpretation.
Believers in the rapture will likely respond that talk of good reasons and objective certainty assumes a context of empirical (scientific) truth, and ignores the fact that their beliefs are based not on science but on faith. They are certain in their belief that the rapture will occur, even though they don’t know it in the scientific sense.
But Camping too would claim that his certainty that the rapture would occur on May 21, 2011, was a matter of faith. He had no scientific justification for his prediction, so what could have grounded his certainty if not his faith? But the certainty of his faith, we all agree, was merely subjective. Objective certainty about a future event requires good reasons.
Given their faith in the Bible, believers in the rapture do offer what they see as good reasons for their view as opposed to Camping’s. They argue that the Bible clearly predicts a temporally unspecified rapture, whereas Camping’s specific date requires highly questionable numerological reasoning. But many Christians—including many of the best Biblical scholars—do not believe that the Bible predicts a historical rapture. Even those who accept the traditional doctrine of a Second Coming of Christ, preceding the end of the world, often reject the idea of a taking up of the saved into heaven, followed by a period of dreadful tribulations on Earth for those who are left behind. Among believers themselves, a historical rapture is at best a highly controversial interpretation, not an objectively established certainty.
The case against Camping was this: His subjective certainty about the rapture required objectively good reasons to expect its occurrence; he provided no such reasons, so his claim was not worthy of belief. Christians who believe in a temporally unspecified rapture agree with this argument. But the same argument undermines their own belief in the rapture. It’s not just that “no one knows the day and hour” of the rapture. No one knows that it is going to happen at all.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Ryan calling uncle on Medicare? byJoan McCarter The unpopularity of his plan is making Paul Ryan very, very sad (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
It appears that the Republicans have decided they need a little more than just a new messaging strategy on their Vouchercare plan. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has now said that he'd be open to making the plan optional.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday that he is open to reforming Medicare in a way that would still leave traditional fee-for-service Medicare as an option for future seniors.
Such an option-based reform could eventually emerge as a compromise way to prevent Medicare’s projected bankruptcy in 13 years.
Ryan, speaking at a policy discussion hosted by The Hill and sponsored by No American Debt, an advocacy group, said that he has all along been open to an option version of his controversial Medicare plan, which Democrats have seized upon as a campaign issue.
“I have always said all along all of those ideas are ideas we should be considering when it comes to legislation,” he said. “When you are down in the details, should there be a fee-for-service option alongside premium support ... they are all good ideas.
“We didn’t decide not to keep [traditional Medicare] as an option,” he said of his budget plan. “When you write a budget resolution, it’s the macro structure of an idea, not the specifics.”
So we never really wanted to privatize Medicare. It was just sort of an idea that we put into sort of a plan that's not, like, legislation or anything. Just an idea that we put out there that maybe we could all talk about. Really.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday that he is open to reforming Medicare in a way that would still leave traditional fee-for-service Medicare as an option for future seniors.
Such an option-based reform could eventually emerge as a compromise way to prevent Medicare’s projected bankruptcy in 13 years.
Ryan, speaking at a policy discussion hosted by The Hill and sponsored by No American Debt, an advocacy group, said that he has all along been open to an option version of his controversial Medicare plan, which Democrats have seized upon as a campaign issue.
“I have always said all along all of those ideas are ideas we should be considering when it comes to legislation,” he said. “When you are down in the details, should there be a fee-for-service option alongside premium support ... they are all good ideas.
“We didn’t decide not to keep [traditional Medicare] as an option,” he said of his budget plan. “When you write a budget resolution, it’s the macro structure of an idea, not the specifics.”
So we never really wanted to privatize Medicare. It was just sort of an idea that we put into sort of a plan that's not, like, legislation or anything. Just an idea that we put out there that maybe we could all talk about. Really.
Who Is James Johnson? By DAVID BROOKS
Most political scandals involve people who are not really enmeshed in the Washington establishment — people like Representative Anthony Weiner or Representative William Jefferson. Most scandals involve spectacularly bad behavior — like posting pictures of your private parts on the Web or hiding $90,000 in cash in your freezer.
But the most devastating scandal in recent history involved dozens of the most respected members of the Washington establishment. Their behavior was not out of the ordinary by any means.
For that reason, the Fannie Mae scandal is the most important political scandal since Watergate. It helped sink the American economy. It has cost taxpayers about $153 billion, so far. It indicts patterns of behavior that are considered normal and respectable in Washington.
The Fannie Mae scandal has gotten relatively little media attention because many of the participants are still powerful, admired and well connected. But Gretchen Morgenson, a Times colleague, and the financial analyst Joshua Rosner have rectified that, writing “Reckless Endangerment,” a brave book that exposes the affair in clear and gripping form.
The story centers around James Johnson, a Democratic sage with a raft of prestigious connections. Appointed as chief executive of Fannie Mae in 1991, Johnson started an aggressive effort to expand homeownership.
Back then, Fannie Mae could raise money at low interest rates because the federal government implicitly guaranteed its debt. In 1995, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this implied guarantee netted the agency $7 billion. Instead of using that money to help buyers, Johnson and other executives kept $2.1 billion for themselves and their shareholders. They used it to further the cause — expanding their clout, their salaries and their bonuses. They did the things that every special-interest group does to advance its interests.
Fannie Mae co-opted relevant activist groups, handing out money to Acorn, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other groups that it might need on its side.
Fannie ginned up Astroturf lobbying campaigns. In 2000, for example, a bill was introduced that threatened Fannie’s special status. The Coalition for Homeownership was formed and letters poured into Congressional offices opposing the bill. Many signatories of the letter had no idea their names had been used.
Fannie lavished campaign contributions on members of Congress. Time and again experts would go before some Congressional committee to warn that Fannie was lowering borrowing standards and posing an enormous risk to taxpayers. Phalanxes of congressmen would be mobilized to bludgeon the experts and kill unfriendly legislation.
Fannie executives ginned up academic studies. They created a foundation that spent tens of millions in advertising. They spent enormous amounts of time and money capturing the regulators who were supposed to police them.
Morgenson and Rosner write with barely suppressed rage, as if great crimes are being committed. But there are no crimes. This is how Washington works. Only two of the characters in this tale come off as egregiously immoral. Johnson made $100 million while supposedly helping the poor. Representative Barney Frank, whose partner at the time worked for Fannie, was arrogantly dismissive when anybody raised doubts about the stability of the whole arrangement.
Most of the people were simply doing what reputable figures do in service to a supposedly good cause. Johnson roped in some of the most respected establishment names: Bill Daley, Tom Donilan, Joseph Stiglitz, Dianne Feinstein, Kit Bond, Franklin Raines, Larry Summers, Robert Zoellick, Ken Starr and so on.
Of course, it all came undone. Underneath, Fannie was a cancer that helped spread risky behavior and low standards across the housing industry. We all know what happened next.
The scandal has sent the message that the leadership class is fundamentally self-dealing. Leaders on the center-right and center-left are always trying to create public-private partnerships to spark socially productive activity. But the biggest public-private partnership to date led to shameless self-enrichment and disastrous results.
It has sent the message that we have hit the moment of demosclerosis. Washington is home to a vertiginous tangle of industry associations, activist groups, think tanks and communications shops. These forces have overwhelmed the government that was originally conceived by the founders.
The final message is that members of the leadership class have done nothing to police themselves. The Wall Street-Industry-Regulator-Lobbyist tangle is even more deeply enmeshed.
People may not like Michele Bachmann, but when they finish “Reckless Endangerment” they will understand why there is a market for politicians like her. They’ll realize that if the existing leadership class doesn’t redefine “normal” behavior, some pungent and colorful movement will sweep in and do it for them.
Paul Krugman is off today.
Call Off the Global Drug War By JIMMY CARTER Atlanta
IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.
The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.
These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”
These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.
This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human rights in a growing number of Latin American countries.
The commission’s facts and arguments are persuasive. It recommends that governments be encouraged to experiment “with models of legal regulation of drugs ... that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.” For effective examples, they can look to policies that have shown promising results in Europe, Australia and other places.
But they probably won’t turn to the United States for advice. Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!
Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing and “three strikes you’re out” laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes. And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his state’s budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education.
Maybe the increased tax burden on wealthy citizens necessary to pay for the war on drugs will help to bring about a reform of America’s drug policies. At least the recommendations of the Global Commission will give some cover to political leaders who wish to do what is right.
A few years ago I worked side by side for four months with a group of prison inmates, who were learning the building trade, to renovate some public buildings in my hometown of Plains, Ga. They were intelligent and dedicated young men, each preparing for a productive life after the completion of his sentence. More than half of them were in prison for drug-related crimes, and would have been better off in college or trade school.
To help such men remain valuable members of society, and to make drug policies more humane and more effective, the American government should support and enact the reforms laid out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.
These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”
These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.
This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human rights in a growing number of Latin American countries.
The commission’s facts and arguments are persuasive. It recommends that governments be encouraged to experiment “with models of legal regulation of drugs ... that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.” For effective examples, they can look to policies that have shown promising results in Europe, Australia and other places.
But they probably won’t turn to the United States for advice. Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!
Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing and “three strikes you’re out” laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes. And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his state’s budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education.
Maybe the increased tax burden on wealthy citizens necessary to pay for the war on drugs will help to bring about a reform of America’s drug policies. At least the recommendations of the Global Commission will give some cover to political leaders who wish to do what is right.
A few years ago I worked side by side for four months with a group of prison inmates, who were learning the building trade, to renovate some public buildings in my hometown of Plains, Ga. They were intelligent and dedicated young men, each preparing for a productive life after the completion of his sentence. More than half of them were in prison for drug-related crimes, and would have been better off in college or trade school.
To help such men remain valuable members of society, and to make drug policies more humane and more effective, the American government should support and enact the reforms laid out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter Center and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
THU JUN 16, 2011 AT 04:50 PM PDT Workers deliver Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act to California Gov. Jerry Brown byLaura Clawson
Farm workers are a particularly vulnerable group, not covered by the National Labor Relations Act and including many undocumented immigrants. In California, where the vast number of farms dwarfs the number of health and safety inspectors tasked with protecting farm workers, the best chance for improving working conditions may lie in unionizing workers, just as a recent study found a significant safety advantage for union mines.
The California state legislature has passed versions of the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act three times only to see it vetoed by Arnold Schwarzenegger each time. Today, following its passage once more, more than 1,000 farm workers and supporters delivered the bill to Gov. Jerry Brown's office, urging him to sign it. The bill:
would give California’s 400,000 farm workers an alternative to traditional, on-the-job polling place elections to decide on union representation. Under the new process, farm workers would fill out state-issued ballots in privacy.
At present, many farm workers fear participating in union elections because the secret-ballot process established in 1975 in California has been subverted. Time and again, anti-union employers fire and threaten farm workers who want union representation. And, on election days growers watch farm workers casting their ballots helping ensure a “No Union” vote.
The group delivering the bill to Gov. Brown included relatives of Maria Isavel Vasquez Jimenez, a 17 year old farm worker who died of heat stroke in 2008. Also apparently Eva Longoria.
Jerry Brown has twelve days to sign the bill and show he's better for farm workers than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sign the petition telling Jerry Brown to make the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act law.
The California state legislature has passed versions of the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act three times only to see it vetoed by Arnold Schwarzenegger each time. Today, following its passage once more, more than 1,000 farm workers and supporters delivered the bill to Gov. Jerry Brown's office, urging him to sign it. The bill:
would give California’s 400,000 farm workers an alternative to traditional, on-the-job polling place elections to decide on union representation. Under the new process, farm workers would fill out state-issued ballots in privacy.
At present, many farm workers fear participating in union elections because the secret-ballot process established in 1975 in California has been subverted. Time and again, anti-union employers fire and threaten farm workers who want union representation. And, on election days growers watch farm workers casting their ballots helping ensure a “No Union” vote.
The group delivering the bill to Gov. Brown included relatives of Maria Isavel Vasquez Jimenez, a 17 year old farm worker who died of heat stroke in 2008. Also apparently Eva Longoria.
Jerry Brown has twelve days to sign the bill and show he's better for farm workers than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sign the petition telling Jerry Brown to make the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act law.
Pawlenty tries to spin debate fail with renewed attack on Romneycare
byJed Lewison
After Tim Pawlenty's sackless performance on Monday night during which he refused to defend his previous day's attack on "Obamneycare," his latest tweet is hilariously lame:
If Pawlenty really believed this nonsense, he'd have said so on Monday. But, like Mitt Romney, Pawlenty doesn't believe a word of the horse crap he's been spewing on the campaign trail.
And, by the way, if Pawlenty wants to compare his record on health care reform with Romney, he should look no further than these numbers: in 2002, the year before Pawlenty took office, 7.4% of Minnesotans lacked insurance. In 2009, 8.8% did. Meanwhile, in 2002, 9.5% of Massachusetts residents lacked insurance. In 2009, just 4.4% did.
So Minnesota went from having fewer uninsured residents than Massachusetts to having twice as many. That's not the "right way." It's the "wrong way." And it's too bad Mitt Romney no longer agrees.
byJed Lewison
After Tim Pawlenty's sackless performance on Monday night during which he refused to defend his previous day's attack on "Obamneycare," his latest tweet is hilariously lame:
If Pawlenty really believed this nonsense, he'd have said so on Monday. But, like Mitt Romney, Pawlenty doesn't believe a word of the horse crap he's been spewing on the campaign trail.
And, by the way, if Pawlenty wants to compare his record on health care reform with Romney, he should look no further than these numbers: in 2002, the year before Pawlenty took office, 7.4% of Minnesotans lacked insurance. In 2009, 8.8% did. Meanwhile, in 2002, 9.5% of Massachusetts residents lacked insurance. In 2009, just 4.4% did.
So Minnesota went from having fewer uninsured residents than Massachusetts to having twice as many. That's not the "right way." It's the "wrong way." And it's too bad Mitt Romney no longer agrees.
Blogger, Iraq war critic Juan Cole target of Bush CIA byJoan McCarterforDaily Kos
THU JUN 16, 2011 AT 06:20 PM PDT
Professor Juan Cole
The story of the Bush CIA being ordered to spy on blogger and prominent Iraq war critic Juan Cole doesn't really come as a surprise, but should result in both outrage and an investigation by the Obama administration.
WASHINGTON — A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.
In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.
What John Aravosis says: "This is a crime. And a rather serious one. The President needs to launch a formal investigation now, into what happened here, and whether any other Americans were illegally targeted." You can be fairly certain that Juan Cole wasn't the only target of the Bush administration.
For his part, Juan Cole is calling for a Congressional investigation.
Carle’s revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon’s use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that the Company and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens....
I believe Carle’s insider account and discount the glib denials of people like Low. Carle is taking a substantial risk in making all this public. I hope that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees will immediately launch an investigation of this clear violation of the law by the Bush White House and by the CIA officials concerned. Like Mr. Carle, I am dismayed at how easy it seems to have been for corrupt WH officials to suborn CIA personnel into activities that had nothing to do with national security abroad and everything to do with silencing domestic critics. This effort was yet another attempt to gut the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, in this case as part of an effort to gut the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Congress should investigate. The Obama administration should investigate.
Professor Juan Cole
The story of the Bush CIA being ordered to spy on blogger and prominent Iraq war critic Juan Cole doesn't really come as a surprise, but should result in both outrage and an investigation by the Obama administration.
WASHINGTON — A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.
Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.
In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.
What John Aravosis says: "This is a crime. And a rather serious one. The President needs to launch a formal investigation now, into what happened here, and whether any other Americans were illegally targeted." You can be fairly certain that Juan Cole wasn't the only target of the Bush administration.
For his part, Juan Cole is calling for a Congressional investigation.
Carle’s revelations come as a visceral shock. You had thought that with all the shennanigans of the CIA against anti-Vietnam war protesters and then Nixon’s use of the agency against critics like Daniel Ellsberg, that the Company and successive White Houses would have learned that the agency had no business spying on American citizens....
I believe Carle’s insider account and discount the glib denials of people like Low. Carle is taking a substantial risk in making all this public. I hope that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees will immediately launch an investigation of this clear violation of the law by the Bush White House and by the CIA officials concerned. Like Mr. Carle, I am dismayed at how easy it seems to have been for corrupt WH officials to suborn CIA personnel into activities that had nothing to do with national security abroad and everything to do with silencing domestic critics. This effort was yet another attempt to gut the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, in this case as part of an effort to gut the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Congress should investigate. The Obama administration should investigate.
See quaoar's diary for more discussion.
The Big Fukushima Lie Flies High by Karl Grossman
The Big Fukushima Lie Flies High
by Karl Grossman
The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “The big lie flies high,” comments Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear.
Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants and U.S. government officials.
Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.
Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?
Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?
Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.
No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington last week.
"They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.
We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11. There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses as well as genetic effects as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”
The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are “professionals” in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial camp. “Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident,” it declares on its website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: “There is no health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United States.”
Acknowledging that “radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the United States,” the American Nuclear Society asserts that’s because we are able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking water due to the Fukushima incident…The radiation from Fukushima, though detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern.”
Says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, “The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”
The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. “For anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant,” Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has insisted. “We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30 countries [and] these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of background radiation…and they do not constitute a public health risk.”
WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.
As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, says: “We do live with background radiation but it does cause cancer.” That’s why there is concern, he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium in some soils. “That’s background [radiation] but it’s not safe. There are absolutely no safe levels of radiation” and adding more radiation “adds to the health impacts.”
There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology,” says Dr. Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, “large populations of people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t agree to.”
Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: “The generally accepted thinking about the safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of
the cancer or genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there’s a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears.”
Of the claims of “no threat to health” from the radioactivity emitted from Fukushima, that “just flies in the face of all the standard models and all the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and cancer.”
As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other continents and around the world, the doses are spread out,” notes Dr. Wing. “But it’s important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person’s individual risk, it doesn’t reduce the number of cancers that result from that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a few thousand people exposed to that same dose.”
He believes “we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that minimizes harm,” is a “sane energy policy.” Those who have “led us into this situation” have caused “big problems.”
And they are still at it even with radioactivity still coming out at Fukushima and expected to for months. On Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, the “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.
Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi.
Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979; Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to expand into the U.S. and worldwide.
Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor technologies;
William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future set up by the Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch nuclear power supporters.
Other participants, according to the program for the event, will be “senior executives and thought leaders from the who’s who of the U.S. new nuclear community.” Bruce Llewelyn, who hosts “White House Chronicle” on PBS television, is listed as the summit’s “moderator.”
There will be programs on the “State of the Renaissance,” “China, India & Emerging Global Nuclear Markets,” “Advancing Nuclear Technology” and “Lessons from Fukushima.”
As the nuclear Pinocchios lie, the nuclear promoters push ahead.
by Karl Grossman
The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “The big lie flies high,” comments Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear.
Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.
Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants and U.S. government officials.
Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.
Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?
Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?
Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.
No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press conference in Washington last week.
"They’re lying,” says Dr. Janette Sherman, a toxicologist and contributing editor of the book Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, its authors, a team of European scientists, determines that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The Fukushima disaster will have a comparable toll, expects Dr. Sherman, who has conducted research into the consequences of radiation for decades. “People living closest to the plants who receive the biggest doses will get sick sooner. Those who are farther away and receive lesser doses will get sick at a slower rate,” she says.
We’ve known about radioactive isotopes for decades,” says Dr. Sherman. “I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and we knew about the effects then. To ignore the biology is to our peril. This is not new science. Cesium-137 goes to soft tissue. Strontium-90 goes to the bones and teeth. Iodine-131 goes to the thyroid gland.” All have been released in large amounts in the Fukushima disaster since it began on March 11. There will inevitably be cancer and other illnesses as well as genetic effects as a result of the substantial discharges of radioactivity released from Fukushima, says Dr. Sherman. “People in Japan will be the most impacted but the radiation has been spreading worldwide and will impact life worldwide.”
The American Nuclear Society, made up of what its website says are “professionals” in the nuclear field, is also deep in the Fukushima denial camp. “Radiation risks to people living in Japan are very low, and no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident,” it declares on its website. As to the U.S., the Illinois-based organization adds: “There is no health risk of radiation from the Fukushima incident to people in the United States.”
Acknowledging that “radiation from Fukushima has been detected within the United States,” the American Nuclear Society asserts that’s because we are able to detect very small amounts of radiation. Through the use of extremely sensitive equipment, U.S. laboratories have been able to detect very minute quantities of radioactive isotopes in air, precipitation, milk, and drinking water due to the Fukushima incident…The radiation from Fukushima, though detectable, is nowhere near the level of public health concern.”
Says Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, “The absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”
The World Health Organization has added its voice to the denial group. “For anyone outside Japan there is currently no health risk from radiation leaking from the nuclear power plant,” Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, has insisted. “We know that there have been measurements in maybe up to about 30 countries [and] these measurements are miniscule, often below levels of background radiation…and they do not constitute a public health risk.”
WHO, not too incidentally, has a formal arrangement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in place since both were established at the UN in the 1950s, to say nothing about issues involving radiation without clearing it with the IAEA, which was set up to specifically promote atomic energy. On Chernobyl, together in an initiative called the “Chernobyl Forum,” they have claimed that “less than 50 deaths have been directly attributed” to that disaster and “a total of up to 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident.” That nuclear Big Lie precedes the new nuclear deception involving the impacts of Fukushima.
As to background radiation, Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Public Health, says: “We do live with background radiation but it does cause cancer.” That’s why there is concern, he notes, about radon gas being emitted in homes from a breakdown of uranium in some soils. “That’s background [radiation] but it’s not safe. There are absolutely no safe levels of radiation” and adding more radiation “adds to the health impacts.”
There has been a cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology,” says Dr. Patterson. Meanwhile, with the Fukushima disaster, “large populations of people are being randomly exposed to radiation that they didn’t ask for, they didn’t agree to.”
Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist who has specialized in the effects of radioactivity at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said: “The generally accepted thinking about the safe dose is that, no, there is no safe dose in terms of
the cancer or genetic effects of radiation. The assumption of most people is that there’s a linear, no-threshold dose response relationship and that just means that as the dose goes down the risk goes down, but it never disappears.”
Of the claims of “no threat to health” from the radioactivity emitted from Fukushima, that “just flies in the face of all the standard models and all the studies that have been done over a long period of time of radiation and cancer.”
As the radiation clouds move away from Fukushima and move far away to other continents and around the world, the doses are spread out,” notes Dr. Wing. “But it’s important for people to know that spreading out a given amount of radiation dose among more people, although it reduces each person’s individual risk, it doesn’t reduce the number of cancers that result from that amount of radiation. So having millions and millions of people exposed to a very small dose could produce just as much cancer as a thousand or a few thousand people exposed to that same dose.”
He believes “we should be focusing on putting pressure on people in government and the energy industry to come up with an energy policy that minimizes harm,” is a “sane energy policy.” Those who have “led us into this situation” have caused “big problems.”
And they are still at it even with radioactivity still coming out at Fukushima and expected to for months. On Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, the “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council.
Council members include General Electric, since 2006 in partnership in its nuclear plant manufacturing business with the Japanese corporation Hitachi.
Other members of the council, notes its information on the summit, include the Nuclear Energy Institute; Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant which underwent a partial meltdown in 1979; Duke Energy, a U.S. utility long a booster of nuclear power; the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. government-created public power company heavily committed to nuclear power; Uranium Producers of America; and AREVA, the French government-financed nuclear power company that has been moving to expand into the U.S. and worldwide.
Also participating in the summit as speakers will be John Kelly, an Obama administration Department of Energy deputy assistant for nuclear reactor technologies;
William Magwood, a nuclear power advocate who is a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Matthew Milazzo representing an entity called the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future set up by the Obama administration; and Congressmen Mike Simpson of Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Interior & Environment and Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, chairman of the House Energy & Power Subcommittee, both staunch nuclear power supporters.
Other participants, according to the program for the event, will be “senior executives and thought leaders from the who’s who of the U.S. new nuclear community.” Bruce Llewelyn, who hosts “White House Chronicle” on PBS television, is listed as the summit’s “moderator.”
There will be programs on the “State of the Renaissance,” “China, India & Emerging Global Nuclear Markets,” “Advancing Nuclear Technology” and “Lessons from Fukushima.”
As the nuclear Pinocchios lie, the nuclear promoters push ahead.
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, has long specialized in doing investigative reporting on nuclear technology. He is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He is the host of the nationally aired TV program, Enviro Close-Up (envirovideo.com).
more Karl Grossman
Enough Budget Slashing, Let's Flip A powerful solution to state deficits is to invert each state's tax structure. by Shannon Moriarty
Our country once had a more widely shared appreciation for both public services and the workers who provide them, including firefighters, teachers, and police officers. Today, however, state legislatures across the country are singing a very different tune. Instead of raising new revenue to protect those services and workers, states are slashing from their budgets the things that make our nation strong.
Cutting to get out of a deficit is like digging to get out of a ditch. It puts everything we value at risk. But it doesn't have to be this way.
What if there were a solution to state deficits that would raise significant revenue, encourage investment, and create jobs — without cutting vital public services? And what if the revenue required by such a solution could be generated solely by making tax systems as fair as most Americans think they ought to be?
The solution is simple: we need to turn states' fiscal status quos upside-down — literally.
United for a Fair Economy's new report, Flip It to Fix It: An Immediate, Fair Solution to State Budget Shortfalls, demonstrates that one powerful solution is to invert each state's tax structure. We calculated how much revenue state governments would raise if they flipped their current effective tax rates at the 50th income percentile and had the top 20 percent of income-earners in each state pay taxes at the same rate as the poorest 20 percent.
The results of this fiscal flip are quite dramatic. By turning each state's tax system on its head — from regressive to progressive — states would raise an additional $490 billion in revenue, easily wiping away the combined $112 billion state and local government budget shortfalls. The lake of red budget ink that has stained capitals across the nation would disappear overnight.
The report shows the extraordinary regressiveness of our current state tax structures. In plainer terms, low- and middle-income taxpayers are paying a greater share of their incomes in taxes than the wealthiest taxpayers in every single state in the nation. Relying on such an unsustainable structure is economically unsound and bad for our communities. And as several recent studies have pointed out, flipping them would be consistent with the majority of Americans' perception of "fair."
Achieving the "flipped" system would require significant changes in our state tax structures. For example, states would need to rely less on regressive sales taxes and raise more revenue from income taxes, in part by levying higher tax rates on the wealthiest Americans.
Of course, the biggest hurdle to achieving this inverted model is a lack of political will. But state-level elected officials can no longer ignore the fundamental roots of their deficit problems. Slashing essential public services and jobs will only drag us further away from achieving the kind of tax fairness that most taxpayers are already demanding.
Cutting to get out of a deficit is like digging to get out of a ditch. It puts everything we value at risk. But it doesn't have to be this way.
What if there were a solution to state deficits that would raise significant revenue, encourage investment, and create jobs — without cutting vital public services? And what if the revenue required by such a solution could be generated solely by making tax systems as fair as most Americans think they ought to be?
The solution is simple: we need to turn states' fiscal status quos upside-down — literally.
United for a Fair Economy's new report, Flip It to Fix It: An Immediate, Fair Solution to State Budget Shortfalls, demonstrates that one powerful solution is to invert each state's tax structure. We calculated how much revenue state governments would raise if they flipped their current effective tax rates at the 50th income percentile and had the top 20 percent of income-earners in each state pay taxes at the same rate as the poorest 20 percent.
The results of this fiscal flip are quite dramatic. By turning each state's tax system on its head — from regressive to progressive — states would raise an additional $490 billion in revenue, easily wiping away the combined $112 billion state and local government budget shortfalls. The lake of red budget ink that has stained capitals across the nation would disappear overnight.
The report shows the extraordinary regressiveness of our current state tax structures. In plainer terms, low- and middle-income taxpayers are paying a greater share of their incomes in taxes than the wealthiest taxpayers in every single state in the nation. Relying on such an unsustainable structure is economically unsound and bad for our communities. And as several recent studies have pointed out, flipping them would be consistent with the majority of Americans' perception of "fair."
Achieving the "flipped" system would require significant changes in our state tax structures. For example, states would need to rely less on regressive sales taxes and raise more revenue from income taxes, in part by levying higher tax rates on the wealthiest Americans.
Of course, the biggest hurdle to achieving this inverted model is a lack of political will. But state-level elected officials can no longer ignore the fundamental roots of their deficit problems. Slashing essential public services and jobs will only drag us further away from achieving the kind of tax fairness that most taxpayers are already demanding.
Shannon Moriarty, a co-author of Flip It to Fix It: An Immediate, Fair Solution to State Budget Shortfalls, is the communications director for the Tax Fairness Organizing Collaborative at United for a Fair Economy.
more Shannon Moriarty
Arizona's Next Scandal? Tea Party State Official Says Ethnic Studies Violates Ban by Jeff Biggers
Arizona could have a new Ethnic Studies scandal on its hands, though not with the students or teachers.
Nearly one year ago, extremist Tea Party state senator John Huppenthal ran for Arizona's superintendent of education post with an inflammatory campaign to "stop la raza" and terminate Tucson's acclaimed Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies (MAS) Program.
At one of the most Orwellian press conferences in recent memory, Huppenthal kept his political campaign promise on Wednesday, June 15, at the Arizona Department of Education in Phoenix, declaring the Ethnic Studies/MAS Program to be out of compliance with the state's controversial ban. Huppenthal introduced a long-awaited and costly audit as proof that the MAS Program promoted resentment towards a race, was designed primarily for a particular ethnic race, and advocated ethnic solidarity. Within a few minutes, Huppenthal and his associate superintendent hastily exited the press conference for other engagements.
Just one glitch: On closer review, the audit -- which admittedly visited only 37% of the classes in the affected Tucson schools for a single 30-minute inspection -- contradicts most of Huppenthal's illusive claims and ultimately finds the MAS Program to be in compliance.
Not that the facts appear to bother the Tea Party politician, a featured speaker at Tea Party rallies that have catcalled President Obama as a "Communist" and "Nazi," or echoed Huppenthal's rants on the Senate floor that undocumented immigrants "nuclear-bombed" parts of Arizona's neighborhoods.
"This decision is not about politics, it is about education," Huppenthal read nervously from a printed statement. He proclaimed his "responsibility to uphold the law and a professional imperative to ensure every student has access to an excellent education."
In truth, the audit questions Huppenthal's own judgment: According to the audit, students in the MAS high school program "graduate in the very least at a rate of 5 percent more than their counterparts in 2005, and at the most, a rate of 11 percent more in 2010." The audit added:
MASD programs are designed to improve student achievement based on the audit team's finding of valuable course descriptions aligned with state standards, commendable curricular unit and lesson plan design, engaging instruction practices, and collective inquiry strategies through Approved State Standards. -- pg. 31
In terms of Huppenthal's points of violation, here's a brief review of the audit results that flat out reject Huppenthal's justification for terminating the Ethnic Studies Program:
Designed for Particular Ethnic Group
A majority of evidence demonstrates that the Mexican American Studies Department's instruction is NOT designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. As previously indicated, every current course syllabus states: "At the core of this course is the idea that ALL people should not be required to give up their ethnic and cultural traditions in order to become part of mainstream society. -- pg. 59
Ethnic Solidarity
No evidence as seen by the auditors exists to indicate that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department program classes advocates ethnic solidarity; rather it has been proven to treat student as individuals. -- pg. 63
Ethnic Resentment
No observable evidence exists that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment toward a race or class of people. The auditors observed the opposite, as students are taught to be accepting of multiple ethnicities of people. -- pg. 55
So, what is in violation? Even Huppenthal dropped the state's earlier claims that the courses promoted the overthrow of the government. Outside of a patronizing dismissal of the program's curriculum development, Huppenthal's team excerpted a handful of very short quotations out of context from various books that somehow override the audit's hugely complimentary assessment. The auditors mainly question whether some of the curriculum material -- such as beloved American historian Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States -- should be taught on a high school academic level.
The audit's summary on page 53: "During the curriculum audit period, no observable evidence was present to suggest that any classroom within Tucson Unified School District is in direct violation of the law A.R.S. 15-112."
Far from being a controversial program, the auditors additionally noted MAS has the required backing of a majority of Tucson Unified School District's board members-- "three board members interviewed by the audit team are clearly supporters of this program."
The auditors conclude:
"No evidence exists in any format that Arizona Revised Statue 15-112 (A) is being violated in any of the six American History from Mexican American Perspective courses visited." -- pg. 69
It echoed the same judgment for the five Latino Literature courses, the four American Government/Social Justice courses, and the Chicano art courses.
What do Huppenthal's auditors recommend?
Maintain Mexican American Studies courses as part of core curriculum for high school course: US History, American Government and Literature. (pg. 66)
The question now is: Should Huppenthal be required to publicly explain his distortions of the audit and be held accountable for any false representations?
Nearly one year ago, extremist Tea Party state senator John Huppenthal ran for Arizona's superintendent of education post with an inflammatory campaign to "stop la raza" and terminate Tucson's acclaimed Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies (MAS) Program.
At one of the most Orwellian press conferences in recent memory, Huppenthal kept his political campaign promise on Wednesday, June 15, at the Arizona Department of Education in Phoenix, declaring the Ethnic Studies/MAS Program to be out of compliance with the state's controversial ban. Huppenthal introduced a long-awaited and costly audit as proof that the MAS Program promoted resentment towards a race, was designed primarily for a particular ethnic race, and advocated ethnic solidarity. Within a few minutes, Huppenthal and his associate superintendent hastily exited the press conference for other engagements.
Just one glitch: On closer review, the audit -- which admittedly visited only 37% of the classes in the affected Tucson schools for a single 30-minute inspection -- contradicts most of Huppenthal's illusive claims and ultimately finds the MAS Program to be in compliance.
Not that the facts appear to bother the Tea Party politician, a featured speaker at Tea Party rallies that have catcalled President Obama as a "Communist" and "Nazi," or echoed Huppenthal's rants on the Senate floor that undocumented immigrants "nuclear-bombed" parts of Arizona's neighborhoods.
"This decision is not about politics, it is about education," Huppenthal read nervously from a printed statement. He proclaimed his "responsibility to uphold the law and a professional imperative to ensure every student has access to an excellent education."
In truth, the audit questions Huppenthal's own judgment: According to the audit, students in the MAS high school program "graduate in the very least at a rate of 5 percent more than their counterparts in 2005, and at the most, a rate of 11 percent more in 2010." The audit added:
MASD programs are designed to improve student achievement based on the audit team's finding of valuable course descriptions aligned with state standards, commendable curricular unit and lesson plan design, engaging instruction practices, and collective inquiry strategies through Approved State Standards. -- pg. 31
In terms of Huppenthal's points of violation, here's a brief review of the audit results that flat out reject Huppenthal's justification for terminating the Ethnic Studies Program:
Designed for Particular Ethnic Group
A majority of evidence demonstrates that the Mexican American Studies Department's instruction is NOT designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. As previously indicated, every current course syllabus states: "At the core of this course is the idea that ALL people should not be required to give up their ethnic and cultural traditions in order to become part of mainstream society. -- pg. 59
Ethnic Solidarity
No evidence as seen by the auditors exists to indicate that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department program classes advocates ethnic solidarity; rather it has been proven to treat student as individuals. -- pg. 63
Ethnic Resentment
No observable evidence exists that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment toward a race or class of people. The auditors observed the opposite, as students are taught to be accepting of multiple ethnicities of people. -- pg. 55
So, what is in violation? Even Huppenthal dropped the state's earlier claims that the courses promoted the overthrow of the government. Outside of a patronizing dismissal of the program's curriculum development, Huppenthal's team excerpted a handful of very short quotations out of context from various books that somehow override the audit's hugely complimentary assessment. The auditors mainly question whether some of the curriculum material -- such as beloved American historian Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States -- should be taught on a high school academic level.
The audit's summary on page 53: "During the curriculum audit period, no observable evidence was present to suggest that any classroom within Tucson Unified School District is in direct violation of the law A.R.S. 15-112."
Far from being a controversial program, the auditors additionally noted MAS has the required backing of a majority of Tucson Unified School District's board members-- "three board members interviewed by the audit team are clearly supporters of this program."
The auditors conclude:
"No evidence exists in any format that Arizona Revised Statue 15-112 (A) is being violated in any of the six American History from Mexican American Perspective courses visited." -- pg. 69
It echoed the same judgment for the five Latino Literature courses, the four American Government/Social Justice courses, and the Chicano art courses.
What do Huppenthal's auditors recommend?
Maintain Mexican American Studies courses as part of core curriculum for high school course: US History, American Government and Literature. (pg. 66)
The question now is: Should Huppenthal be required to publicly explain his distortions of the audit and be held accountable for any false representations?
Jeff Biggers is the author of The United States of Appalachia, and more recently, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (The Nation/Basic Books).
more Jeff Biggers
A Woman Poet Is the Sign of Defiance in Bahrain by César Chelala Ayat al-Qarmezi, a 20 year-old woman poet in Bahrain, recently condemned to one year in prison, has become the human face of defiance against the regime ruling the country. Her crime, to have spoken at a pro-reform rally in Manama’s Pearl Roundabout in February. Unless the government changes its approach and accepts peaceful dissent, the seeds of resistance will flower in Bahrain. Speaking at a rally, Ayat al-Qarmezi recited a poem among whose lyrics were, “We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery.” She was arrested after the police raided her parents’ house and threatened to kill her brothers if Ayat didn’t give herself up. During her detention she was whipped across her face with electric cable, held for days in a small cell with near-freezing temperatures and forced to clean lavatories with her bare hands, the same hands that wrote other beautiful verses. One of her poems, translated from the Arabic by Ghias Aljundi, says: We don’t like to live in a palace And we are not after power We are the people who Break down humiliation And discard oppression With peace as our tool We are people who Do not want others to be living in the Dark Ages. Ayat is one of many women – doctors and medical personnel among others – who have been targets of repression by Bahrain’s regime. Her detention has been harshly condemned by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. “By locking up a female poet merely for expressing her views in public, Bahrain’s authorities are demonstrating how free speech and assembly are brutally denied to ordinary Bahrainis,” stated Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Director for the Middle East and North Africa. Smart asked that the Bahraini authorities drop all unfair charges against Ayat al-Qarmezi, and release her immediately and unconditionally. His request follows President Barak Obama’s statement during the visit to Washington of Bahrain’s Crown Prince Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa that stability of the Gulf Kingdom “depends upon respect for universal human rights.” Human Rights Watch (HRW) has joined the protests against the Bahrain regime’s actions, particularly regarding special military court proceedings against those arrested during the country’s anti-government protests. “Bahraini authorities should immediately halt all proceedings before the special military court and free everyone held solely for exercising the rights to free speech and peaceful assembly,” stated HRW, while at the same time demanding that all those charged with criminal offenses be tried in independent civilian courts. The young Bahraini poet joins the ranks of other women in history who have written forcefully against brutality and oppression. In the book “Women Against Tyranny: Poems of Resistance During the Holocaust,” edited by Davi Walders, Marianne Baum, one of the creators of the Baum Group, a resistance group opposing the Nazis from 1937 until 1942 when most were arrested and sent to concentration camps, wrote, They hunted us. Retaliation everywhere. Then the Sondergericht –‘special court.’ They carried me there, my shattered legs dangling. No one talked. A hundred Berliners rounded up for each of us. Five hundred –most shot there and then; The rest, slower deaths at Sachsenhausen. This, too, our burden, but…would they Have died anyway? You must understand. We had to do something.
Changing a few circumstantial details, those words could have been written by Ayat al-Qarmezi today in Bahrain.
César Chelala, MD, PhD, is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award. He is also the foreign correspondent for Middle East Times International (Australia).
César Chelala, MD, PhD, is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award. He is also the foreign correspondent for Middle East Times International (Australia).
Published on Thursday, June 16, 2011 by The Nation End the 'War on Drugs' by Peter Rothberg
Tomorrow's 40th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of the War on Drugs comes amid growing recognition that the policy, and all that it wrought, is a complete disaster.
Shifting priorities toward a more sensible approach that offers treatment rather than punishment for addicts may seem like a daunting task but public opinion is increasingly opposed to the war on drugs, and many states facing tight budgets are de-emphasizing expensive criminalization in favor of strategies that decrease the penal population.
As Sasha Abramsky explained in an extensively reported and still-timely 2009 piece, "out of economic necessity and because of shifting mores, the country will likely get more selective, and smarter, about how it uses incarceration and whom it targets for long spells behind bars."
Last week, the Global Commission on Drug Policy issued a report declaring unreservedly: “The global war on drugs has failed.” This strong criticism of the status quo was endorsed by the three former Latin American presidents who organized the commission — Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico — along with 16 other prominent world leaders, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former head of NATO Javier Solana, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson.
Meanwhile, in the US, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of police officers, judges and related professionals, held a well-attended DC rally this past Tuesday, citing its own report criticizing the Obama Administration for doing precious little to reframe drug abuse as a matter of public health rather than one of criminal justice. The report calculates that the war on drugs has brought us 40 million arrests at a cost of one trillion dollars without making even a tiny dent in drug use.
The transpartisan coalition of people who want to end the drug war is one of the most diverse, broad-based alliances in America today, drawing from all regions and most spots on the political spectrum. Join the growing call by signing the Drug Policy Alliance's national petition, and by contacting your member of Congress imploring him or her to help end the war on drugs. Drug Policy Alliance staff will hand deliver your letter to your representative on Capitol Hill.
Shifting priorities toward a more sensible approach that offers treatment rather than punishment for addicts may seem like a daunting task but public opinion is increasingly opposed to the war on drugs, and many states facing tight budgets are de-emphasizing expensive criminalization in favor of strategies that decrease the penal population.
As Sasha Abramsky explained in an extensively reported and still-timely 2009 piece, "out of economic necessity and because of shifting mores, the country will likely get more selective, and smarter, about how it uses incarceration and whom it targets for long spells behind bars."
Last week, the Global Commission on Drug Policy issued a report declaring unreservedly: “The global war on drugs has failed.” This strong criticism of the status quo was endorsed by the three former Latin American presidents who organized the commission — Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico — along with 16 other prominent world leaders, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former head of NATO Javier Solana, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson.
Meanwhile, in the US, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of police officers, judges and related professionals, held a well-attended DC rally this past Tuesday, citing its own report criticizing the Obama Administration for doing precious little to reframe drug abuse as a matter of public health rather than one of criminal justice. The report calculates that the war on drugs has brought us 40 million arrests at a cost of one trillion dollars without making even a tiny dent in drug use.
The transpartisan coalition of people who want to end the drug war is one of the most diverse, broad-based alliances in America today, drawing from all regions and most spots on the political spectrum. Join the growing call by signing the Drug Policy Alliance's national petition, and by contacting your member of Congress imploring him or her to help end the war on drugs. Drug Policy Alliance staff will hand deliver your letter to your representative on Capitol Hill.
Copyright © 2011 The Nation
Peter Rothberg writes the ActNow column for the The Nation. ActNow aims to put
Who Is Tim DeChristopher? From Coal Belt, Through Mountain Trails, On Route To Obama’s Prison Cell by Subhankar Banerjee
Often we focus on a single act—more heroic the act is, more attention we pay. We also focus on a single result—more it tends toward either end of a good–bad spectrum, more attention we pay. Along the way, we skip the journey that led to the act or realize that the result is only a small stop on a long journey. Such is the story of young climate justice activist Tim DeChristopher, who is without a doubt a lighting rod of his generation.
We’ve come to know Tim DeChristopher through his one courageous act of civil disobedience—of disrupting an ill–conceived oil and gas auction on 150,000 acres of public lands in southern Utah that the George W. Bush administration pushed through fast track leasing during the last days of his presidency. The auction took place on December 17, 2008. That day bidder–imposter Tim DeChristopher successfully bought (without any money) 22,000 acres of land near Moab and the Canyon Lands National Park and saved it from fossil fuel extraction. On March 3, 2011 he was convicted of ‘fraud’ and now he awaits sentencing to take place come Thursday on June 23rd—up to ten years in federal prison plus a $750,000 fine to be handed to him by the Barack Obama administration.
Even though I wrote about Tim in March after his guilty verdict, I knew little about the person and have ever since been curious, “Who is Tim DeChristopher?”
On Monday June 13 Tim spoke in front of a capacity crowd at the University of Art & Design in Santa Fe. New Energy Economy (NEE), a Santa Fe based organization brought Tim to our hometown. NEE has been leading a very effective campaign to move New Mexico beyond fossil fuels and toward clean energy. Monday’s event opened with three young poets: Lisa Donahue who teaches art and poetry at the Santa Fe Art Institute, followed by Nolan Eskeets from the Navajo Nation and Marty Frawa from the Jemez Pueblo—they spoke with poetry and performance of struggles against pollution from nuclear, coal and oil. The theme for the evening was to make New Mexico coal free. Mariel Nanasi executive director of NEE in her powerful introductory remarks said, “From infants and children to adults and our beloved elders ... the litany of coal’s negative health effects is brutal and it’s growing ... Asthma, emphysema, lung cancer, stomach cancer, heart disease, stroke, neurological damage and infant mortality. ... Of course, these terrible health threats from toxic pollution are not the whole sad story. Coal is also a primary driver of man–made climate change—the defining moral and ethical environmental challenge of our age.”
Tim began speaking. His honesty, directness, intelligence, empathy, strategic thinking for creative action and his no-nonsense commitment for climate justice, I found contagious. Following morning, I sat down for one–on–one conversation with him.
Here is a brief story of Tim DeChristopher’s journey from the Appalachian coal belts, through mountain trails of east and the west, and now on his way to Obama’s prison cell.
Reading Thoreau’s Walden Along Otter Creek
Tim was born and raised in West Milford, West Virginia, a small town about 120 miles northeast of Charleston. According to a 2000 census the town had a population of 651 people with a racial makeup of 99.54% White, and the rest Native American, Hispanic and other races. I did the math—the remaining 0.46% of 651 is exactly 3 non–white people. As you’ll see all this has something to do with who he is today. His father worked in the Natural Gas fields. Tim recounts with great fondness that his mother was an activist and one of the founders of the West Virginia Sierra Club and fought against the Mountaintop coal mining in the Appalachia. It seems to me that his mom is perhaps the greatest inspiration of his life.
He was five years old when he did his first backpack trip. He remembers the only vacations the family took were in the wilderness.
When he got a bit older, the family moved to Pittsburgh. He remembers living in Pittsburgh was an eye opener for him. “When I was in West Virginia the only job potential people had was to work in coal mines, everyone’s parents worked in coal mines,” he says. “But in Pittsburgh people did a wide variety of things. It's not that people in Pittsburgh were smarter than people in West Virginia, it is just that they had so much more potential to do other things than work only in a coal mine.”
When he was 16 his mother sent him back to West Virginia. He did a solo backpack trip—walked for eight days through the Otter Creek Wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest. He carried Henry Thoreau’s Walden in his backpack and finished it by the end of the trip. He says that trip was a defining moment of his life, “I was free from other influences, including the media and cultural influences.”
He continued to do outdoor trips. The following year he read Ed Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. But he said that he wanted to leave behind these readings and figure things out for himself—a journey of one’s own, you might say.
He moved west and enrolled at the Arizona State University in Phoenix. “I spent more time in the outdoors than in the classrooms,” he says. After two years of college, he dropped out and moved to the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. There, he worked with kids for 3 1/2 years. Then he moved to Salt Lake City and worked for two years with youth, whom the society had labeled, in his words “troubled teens.” He says, “They had fairly legitimate complaints against the injustices of the world. I was helping perfectly fine kids fit into a broken system.” During that time he realized that much of the decisions societies make are based in economics and the economic system.
From Classroom to the Bidding Room
He enrolled at the University of Utah as an economics student. “They have one of the best progressive economics programs in the country,” he says, “I was lucky.” According to him the mainstream economics education in the U.S. is deeply influenced by corporate America, but he found that the classes he began taking were an exception to that homogenous form of education. He recounts the teachings of some his professors with great admiration.
He told me that in one of his economics classes they discussed one particular oil and gas lease sale, the very same one that he ended up disrupting. In the final exam there was one crucial question he remembers, “If only oil and gas men were bidding on the lease sales to take place soon, will the final lease price reflect the true cost of developing oil and gas on public lands?” He figured the answer of course is a big NO, as taxpayers take care of the huge amounts of hidden costs that we do not see—subsidies that the government grants to the oil companies.
He didn’t know at the time that he could become a ‘bidder from the outside.’ In fact he acknowledges that all he wished for when he walked into that auction room was to scream and shout at them and be kicked out. He wanted to protest this auction because he knew the Bush administration was trying to sale off these lands without appropriate review and through fast track sales during the 11th hour of his presidency. But to his great surprise the gatekeeper looked at this 27–year old well–dressed stout white man and asked, “would you like to be a bidder?” to which he responded with confidence “yes,” and became the notorious “bidder 70.”
On December 22, 2008 he did an interview with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now after he successfully secured the leases and disrupted the sale. Earlier this year he talked about the guilty verdict with Umbra Fisk of Grist, and this week with Jason Mark of Earth Island Journal about how he is getting ready for his time in prison. Together these interviews give a good picture of what happened inside that auction room; his guilty verdict earlier this year and the legal system; the incredible support from his friends and fellow activists who had gathered outside the courthouse; and what has happened since then.
I won’t repeat any of that, but instead focus on a few things he brought up in his talk and during our conversation that might shed some light on his ongoing journey.
From Love of Land To Justice and Equality
Talking with him I realized that he has spent an enormous amount of time in the outdoors and he loves it, but when I asked him whether he did the bidding because he wanted to save these lands from exploitation by the oilers, he responded, “I wasn’t motivated to protect land. I wouldn’t go to jail to protect land. I’m primarily motivated to protect human beings. This is about climate justice. We must move away from fossil fuels and create a world with clean energy for sure, but not continue corporate exploitation through the banner of green energy, a world where people have the power, not corporations. It is about equality and justice.”
I was fascinated that someone who loves walking in the wild is instead talking about justice.
The grandpa of the U.S. environmental movement, John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club hiked incessantly and advocated for the protection of public lands from industrial exploitation. Yet at the same time, Muir was one of the strongest supporters of militarization of public lands—the Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the U.S. He wanted the military to run these parks so that the vulnerable tourists would be protected from the dangerous Native Americans. As it happens the native communities had actively hunted in these regions, their homeland, from which they were then forcibly removed. All of this is written up in a magnificent book “Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation” by historian Karl Jacoby. Justice? No, Muir could not care about justice, back then. Then Muir got older, went to Alaska, and wrote the book, “Travels in Alaska.” In this book he wrote with great empathy about the native communities of Alaska who had provided him with home and food. Justice? Yes, of course, Muir certainly cared about justice, then.
You see, as long as we are willing to engage deeply, our life takes us to places we didn’t know we would go. Tim’s journey through lands and his work with kids and youth have brought him to a place now where he is fighting for justice and equality.
I asked if he is also fighting for birds and animals, to which he responded, “I don’t think so, I’m fighting for fellow humans to have a just and equitable life.“ Then he paused and said rather tentatively, “all these things are connected.” I joked with him that ten years from now, he’ll also be fighting for birds and animals and Obama’s prison would be a forgotten history. We both laughed.
At the Santa Fe event, there was a petition to President Obama to pardon Tim. But during the talk Tim made it very clear he isn’t begging anyone, nor is he looking for a pardon by Obama. In fact, he said that, “I’m sure they’re monitoring all my moves, and everything I’ve been saying. And, I’m saying a lot of things, really strong things, and it could get reflected in their decision on how harsh a sentence they give me.” Then he continued, “But you know, if I were a colored man, I’d be long behind bars, and no one would know what I’m trying to do. I’m a white man and I think I remind them of their son or something like that, so they let me do things that a non–white man wouldn’t be allowed.” I think his childhood certainly helps him to think about the non–white world. Today many of his friends are colored people with whom he discusses all these, and it is no surprise that he keeps talking about justice for others.
He also talks a lot about history and says that we spend so much time talking about science and so little about history. His knowledge of the history of social movements in the U.S. runs deep and he articulates these struggles as it may have implications to the climate justice movement quite profoundly. Today, when he is lending his voice to the struggle of Mountaintop coal removal in the Appalachia, it is a very genuine and heartfelt engagement that I’m sure brings him back to his childhood. I bet he talks to his mom who fought the same fight decades earlier and can only surmise that she is very proud of him.
Tim founded Peaceful Uprising. I asked why? He told me, “You know the Big Greens have failed my generation, they are about big money but not effective action, and they have been completely ineffective about climate change, the greatest threat to my generation. I realized there is a gap and we wanted to fill that gap.” He talked about that gap, “We want more direct action, more civil disobedience, we want empowerment of communities and people, not governments and corporations, we want justice and equality and power back to the people.” But he is not naive and realizes that it won’t come easy and says, “We have to sacrifice. We have to let go. When I walked into that auction room, I had already let go of everything, there was nothing they could take away from me. At that moment, I felt powerful.” Because he has worked with kids and teens, he understands their frustrations and says, “We live in a hyper individualized society. We feel isolated. I hope to make young people understand that they’re part of a much larger community and we’re in this struggle together. Climate change is something we’re so deeply into that our only way out is by fighting. Peaceful Uprising is about giving voice to the youth, to let them know that there is a community out there who feel the same way they do. We will fight for climate justice.”
Young people who are paying attention, like Tim, understand very well the severity of climate change on their generation. And, it is no surprise that they would be more willing to take action against destruction. If a Cree youth takes action against the destruction of her homeland by the Tar Sanders—will we put her in prison? Yes, we will. If a Navajo youth takes action against the destruction of his homeland by Coalers—will we put him in prison? Yes, we will. If a Gwich’in youth takes action against the destruction of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by the Oilers—will we put her in prison? Yes, we will. If an Inupiat youth takes action against the destruction of their Oceans by the Oilers—will we put him in prison? Yes, we will.
Tim told us, “Government’s main motivation in sending me to prison is to intimidate others. They want to set an example with me.”
This is a young man with full of empathy and tremendous potential to inspire his generation to fight for a healthy and just world. Yet, the Obama administration will put him behind bars—a shame of astronomical magnitude. But it is understandable, Obama is in a reelection campaign right now and he has to raise a lot of money. The last people he wants to upset is the oil–and–coal lobby that’ll help him get reelected, the same lobby that helped George W. Bush get elected and reelected. Our leaders, red and blue alike, are all part of a big happy fossil fuel family.
Whatever happens with the sentencing on June 23rd, one thing has become clear to me is that Tim DeChristopher’s journey did not start with a single heroic act of disrupting an oil lease sale during the George W. Bush administration, nor will it end inside Barack Obama’s prison cell. Let us stay engaged.
We’ve come to know Tim DeChristopher through his one courageous act of civil disobedience—of disrupting an ill–conceived oil and gas auction on 150,000 acres of public lands in southern Utah that the George W. Bush administration pushed through fast track leasing during the last days of his presidency. The auction took place on December 17, 2008. That day bidder–imposter Tim DeChristopher successfully bought (without any money) 22,000 acres of land near Moab and the Canyon Lands National Park and saved it from fossil fuel extraction. On March 3, 2011 he was convicted of ‘fraud’ and now he awaits sentencing to take place come Thursday on June 23rd—up to ten years in federal prison plus a $750,000 fine to be handed to him by the Barack Obama administration.
Even though I wrote about Tim in March after his guilty verdict, I knew little about the person and have ever since been curious, “Who is Tim DeChristopher?”
On Monday June 13 Tim spoke in front of a capacity crowd at the University of Art & Design in Santa Fe. New Energy Economy (NEE), a Santa Fe based organization brought Tim to our hometown. NEE has been leading a very effective campaign to move New Mexico beyond fossil fuels and toward clean energy. Monday’s event opened with three young poets: Lisa Donahue who teaches art and poetry at the Santa Fe Art Institute, followed by Nolan Eskeets from the Navajo Nation and Marty Frawa from the Jemez Pueblo—they spoke with poetry and performance of struggles against pollution from nuclear, coal and oil. The theme for the evening was to make New Mexico coal free. Mariel Nanasi executive director of NEE in her powerful introductory remarks said, “From infants and children to adults and our beloved elders ... the litany of coal’s negative health effects is brutal and it’s growing ... Asthma, emphysema, lung cancer, stomach cancer, heart disease, stroke, neurological damage and infant mortality. ... Of course, these terrible health threats from toxic pollution are not the whole sad story. Coal is also a primary driver of man–made climate change—the defining moral and ethical environmental challenge of our age.”
Tim began speaking. His honesty, directness, intelligence, empathy, strategic thinking for creative action and his no-nonsense commitment for climate justice, I found contagious. Following morning, I sat down for one–on–one conversation with him.
Here is a brief story of Tim DeChristopher’s journey from the Appalachian coal belts, through mountain trails of east and the west, and now on his way to Obama’s prison cell.
Reading Thoreau’s Walden Along Otter Creek
Tim was born and raised in West Milford, West Virginia, a small town about 120 miles northeast of Charleston. According to a 2000 census the town had a population of 651 people with a racial makeup of 99.54% White, and the rest Native American, Hispanic and other races. I did the math—the remaining 0.46% of 651 is exactly 3 non–white people. As you’ll see all this has something to do with who he is today. His father worked in the Natural Gas fields. Tim recounts with great fondness that his mother was an activist and one of the founders of the West Virginia Sierra Club and fought against the Mountaintop coal mining in the Appalachia. It seems to me that his mom is perhaps the greatest inspiration of his life.
He was five years old when he did his first backpack trip. He remembers the only vacations the family took were in the wilderness.
When he got a bit older, the family moved to Pittsburgh. He remembers living in Pittsburgh was an eye opener for him. “When I was in West Virginia the only job potential people had was to work in coal mines, everyone’s parents worked in coal mines,” he says. “But in Pittsburgh people did a wide variety of things. It's not that people in Pittsburgh were smarter than people in West Virginia, it is just that they had so much more potential to do other things than work only in a coal mine.”
When he was 16 his mother sent him back to West Virginia. He did a solo backpack trip—walked for eight days through the Otter Creek Wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest. He carried Henry Thoreau’s Walden in his backpack and finished it by the end of the trip. He says that trip was a defining moment of his life, “I was free from other influences, including the media and cultural influences.”
He continued to do outdoor trips. The following year he read Ed Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. But he said that he wanted to leave behind these readings and figure things out for himself—a journey of one’s own, you might say.
He moved west and enrolled at the Arizona State University in Phoenix. “I spent more time in the outdoors than in the classrooms,” he says. After two years of college, he dropped out and moved to the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. There, he worked with kids for 3 1/2 years. Then he moved to Salt Lake City and worked for two years with youth, whom the society had labeled, in his words “troubled teens.” He says, “They had fairly legitimate complaints against the injustices of the world. I was helping perfectly fine kids fit into a broken system.” During that time he realized that much of the decisions societies make are based in economics and the economic system.
From Classroom to the Bidding Room
He enrolled at the University of Utah as an economics student. “They have one of the best progressive economics programs in the country,” he says, “I was lucky.” According to him the mainstream economics education in the U.S. is deeply influenced by corporate America, but he found that the classes he began taking were an exception to that homogenous form of education. He recounts the teachings of some his professors with great admiration.
He told me that in one of his economics classes they discussed one particular oil and gas lease sale, the very same one that he ended up disrupting. In the final exam there was one crucial question he remembers, “If only oil and gas men were bidding on the lease sales to take place soon, will the final lease price reflect the true cost of developing oil and gas on public lands?” He figured the answer of course is a big NO, as taxpayers take care of the huge amounts of hidden costs that we do not see—subsidies that the government grants to the oil companies.
He didn’t know at the time that he could become a ‘bidder from the outside.’ In fact he acknowledges that all he wished for when he walked into that auction room was to scream and shout at them and be kicked out. He wanted to protest this auction because he knew the Bush administration was trying to sale off these lands without appropriate review and through fast track sales during the 11th hour of his presidency. But to his great surprise the gatekeeper looked at this 27–year old well–dressed stout white man and asked, “would you like to be a bidder?” to which he responded with confidence “yes,” and became the notorious “bidder 70.”
On December 22, 2008 he did an interview with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now after he successfully secured the leases and disrupted the sale. Earlier this year he talked about the guilty verdict with Umbra Fisk of Grist, and this week with Jason Mark of Earth Island Journal about how he is getting ready for his time in prison. Together these interviews give a good picture of what happened inside that auction room; his guilty verdict earlier this year and the legal system; the incredible support from his friends and fellow activists who had gathered outside the courthouse; and what has happened since then.
I won’t repeat any of that, but instead focus on a few things he brought up in his talk and during our conversation that might shed some light on his ongoing journey.
From Love of Land To Justice and Equality
Talking with him I realized that he has spent an enormous amount of time in the outdoors and he loves it, but when I asked him whether he did the bidding because he wanted to save these lands from exploitation by the oilers, he responded, “I wasn’t motivated to protect land. I wouldn’t go to jail to protect land. I’m primarily motivated to protect human beings. This is about climate justice. We must move away from fossil fuels and create a world with clean energy for sure, but not continue corporate exploitation through the banner of green energy, a world where people have the power, not corporations. It is about equality and justice.”
I was fascinated that someone who loves walking in the wild is instead talking about justice.
The grandpa of the U.S. environmental movement, John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club hiked incessantly and advocated for the protection of public lands from industrial exploitation. Yet at the same time, Muir was one of the strongest supporters of militarization of public lands—the Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the U.S. He wanted the military to run these parks so that the vulnerable tourists would be protected from the dangerous Native Americans. As it happens the native communities had actively hunted in these regions, their homeland, from which they were then forcibly removed. All of this is written up in a magnificent book “Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation” by historian Karl Jacoby. Justice? No, Muir could not care about justice, back then. Then Muir got older, went to Alaska, and wrote the book, “Travels in Alaska.” In this book he wrote with great empathy about the native communities of Alaska who had provided him with home and food. Justice? Yes, of course, Muir certainly cared about justice, then.
You see, as long as we are willing to engage deeply, our life takes us to places we didn’t know we would go. Tim’s journey through lands and his work with kids and youth have brought him to a place now where he is fighting for justice and equality.
I asked if he is also fighting for birds and animals, to which he responded, “I don’t think so, I’m fighting for fellow humans to have a just and equitable life.“ Then he paused and said rather tentatively, “all these things are connected.” I joked with him that ten years from now, he’ll also be fighting for birds and animals and Obama’s prison would be a forgotten history. We both laughed.
At the Santa Fe event, there was a petition to President Obama to pardon Tim. But during the talk Tim made it very clear he isn’t begging anyone, nor is he looking for a pardon by Obama. In fact, he said that, “I’m sure they’re monitoring all my moves, and everything I’ve been saying. And, I’m saying a lot of things, really strong things, and it could get reflected in their decision on how harsh a sentence they give me.” Then he continued, “But you know, if I were a colored man, I’d be long behind bars, and no one would know what I’m trying to do. I’m a white man and I think I remind them of their son or something like that, so they let me do things that a non–white man wouldn’t be allowed.” I think his childhood certainly helps him to think about the non–white world. Today many of his friends are colored people with whom he discusses all these, and it is no surprise that he keeps talking about justice for others.
He also talks a lot about history and says that we spend so much time talking about science and so little about history. His knowledge of the history of social movements in the U.S. runs deep and he articulates these struggles as it may have implications to the climate justice movement quite profoundly. Today, when he is lending his voice to the struggle of Mountaintop coal removal in the Appalachia, it is a very genuine and heartfelt engagement that I’m sure brings him back to his childhood. I bet he talks to his mom who fought the same fight decades earlier and can only surmise that she is very proud of him.
Tim founded Peaceful Uprising. I asked why? He told me, “You know the Big Greens have failed my generation, they are about big money but not effective action, and they have been completely ineffective about climate change, the greatest threat to my generation. I realized there is a gap and we wanted to fill that gap.” He talked about that gap, “We want more direct action, more civil disobedience, we want empowerment of communities and people, not governments and corporations, we want justice and equality and power back to the people.” But he is not naive and realizes that it won’t come easy and says, “We have to sacrifice. We have to let go. When I walked into that auction room, I had already let go of everything, there was nothing they could take away from me. At that moment, I felt powerful.” Because he has worked with kids and teens, he understands their frustrations and says, “We live in a hyper individualized society. We feel isolated. I hope to make young people understand that they’re part of a much larger community and we’re in this struggle together. Climate change is something we’re so deeply into that our only way out is by fighting. Peaceful Uprising is about giving voice to the youth, to let them know that there is a community out there who feel the same way they do. We will fight for climate justice.”
Young people who are paying attention, like Tim, understand very well the severity of climate change on their generation. And, it is no surprise that they would be more willing to take action against destruction. If a Cree youth takes action against the destruction of her homeland by the Tar Sanders—will we put her in prison? Yes, we will. If a Navajo youth takes action against the destruction of his homeland by Coalers—will we put him in prison? Yes, we will. If a Gwich’in youth takes action against the destruction of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by the Oilers—will we put her in prison? Yes, we will. If an Inupiat youth takes action against the destruction of their Oceans by the Oilers—will we put him in prison? Yes, we will.
Tim told us, “Government’s main motivation in sending me to prison is to intimidate others. They want to set an example with me.”
This is a young man with full of empathy and tremendous potential to inspire his generation to fight for a healthy and just world. Yet, the Obama administration will put him behind bars—a shame of astronomical magnitude. But it is understandable, Obama is in a reelection campaign right now and he has to raise a lot of money. The last people he wants to upset is the oil–and–coal lobby that’ll help him get reelected, the same lobby that helped George W. Bush get elected and reelected. Our leaders, red and blue alike, are all part of a big happy fossil fuel family.
Whatever happens with the sentencing on June 23rd, one thing has become clear to me is that Tim DeChristopher’s journey did not start with a single heroic act of disrupting an oil lease sale during the George W. Bush administration, nor will it end inside Barack Obama’s prison cell. Let us stay engaged.
Copyright 2011 Subhankar Banerjee
Fukushima: It's Much Worse Than You Think Scientific experts believe Japan's nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public. by Dahr Jamail
"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
Japan's 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also lead to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."
TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.
"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"
Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.
"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."
Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive "hot spots" around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.
"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."
Radiation monitors for children
Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.
TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.
Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.
In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.
The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.
"There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to children," Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.
Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, but added: "There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese government's 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well."
Gundersen points out that far more radiation has been released than has been reported.
"They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this," he said. "The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."
According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles".
"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."
Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.
The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer.
"These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant," he explained, "One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April."
Blame the US?
In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear reactors over the next decade. In a referendum vote this Monday, 95 per cent of Italians voted in favour of blocking a nuclear power revival in their country. A recent newspaper poll in Japan shows nearly three-quarters of respondents favour a phase-out of nuclear power in Japan.
Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?
Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.
Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in Japan.
He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the fact that most of them are of US design.
"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes," Dr Sawada told Al Jazeera. "I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan."
Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US, something Dr Sawada feels is also a large component of the problem.
"Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use," he explained. "The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese government not use this technology yet, but the government accepted to use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power stations, and was thus subjected to US government policy."
As a 13-year-old, Dr Sawada experienced the US nuclear attack against Japan from his home, situated just 1400 metres from the hypocentre of the Hiroshima bomb.
"I think the Fukushima accident has caused the Japanese people to abandon the myth that nuclear power stations are safe," he said. "Now the opinions of the Japanese people have rapidly changed. Well beyond half the population believes Japan should move towards natural electricity."
A problem of infinite proportions
Dr Ramana expects the plant reactors and fuel cores to be cooled enough for a shutdown within two years.
"But it is going to take a very long time before the fuel can be removed from the reactor," he added. "Dealing with the cracking and compromised structure and dealing with radiation in the area will take several years, there's no question about that."
Dr Sawada is not as clear about how long a cold shutdown could take, and said the problem will be "the effects from caesium-137 that remains in the soil and the polluted water around the power station and underground. It will take a year, or more time, to deal with this".
Gundersen pointed out that the units are still leaking radiation.
"They are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount of radioactive liquid," he said. "It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids."
Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how to cool two of the units.
"Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple," he said. "After the earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you're at a point where, if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They've not figured out how to cool units three and four."
Gundersen's assessment of solving this crisis is grim.
"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor."
Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely.
"Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations," he explained. "To do otherwise is simply an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing."
Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan.
"So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water," Gundersen said. "We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come."
Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen's assessment.
"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."
Japan's 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also lead to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."
TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water - as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.
"The problem is how to keep it cool," says Gundersen. "They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?"
Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.
"The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor," Gundersen added. "TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water."
Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive "hot spots" around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.
"We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl," said Gundersen. "The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl."
Radiation monitors for children
Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.
TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.
Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable.
In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.
The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.
"There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to children," Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.
Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, but added: "There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese government's 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well."
Gundersen points out that far more radiation has been released than has been reported.
"They recalculated the amount of radiation released, but the news is really not talking about this," he said. "The new calculations show that within the first week of the accident, they released 2.3 times as much radiation as they thought they released in the first 80 days."
According to Gundersen, the exposed reactors and fuel cores are continuing to release microns of caesium, strontium, and plutonium isotopes. These are referred to as "hot particles".
"We are discovering hot particles everywhere in Japan, even in Tokyo," he said. "Scientists are finding these everywhere. Over the last 90 days these hot particles have continued to fall and are being deposited in high concentrations. A lot of people are picking these up in car engine air filters."
Radioactive air filters from cars in Fukushima prefecture and Tokyo are now common, and Gundersen says his sources are finding radioactive air filters in the greater Seattle area of the US as well.
The hot particles on them can eventually lead to cancer.
"These get stuck in your lungs or GI tract, and they are a constant irritant," he explained, "One cigarette doesn't get you, but over time they do. These [hot particles] can cause cancer, but you can't measure them with a Geiger counter. Clearly people in Fukushima prefecture have breathed in a large amount of these particles. Clearly the upper West Coast of the US has people being affected. That area got hit pretty heavy in April."
Blame the US?
In reaction to the Fukushima catastrophe, Germany is phasing out all of its nuclear reactors over the next decade. In a referendum vote this Monday, 95 per cent of Italians voted in favour of blocking a nuclear power revival in their country. A recent newspaper poll in Japan shows nearly three-quarters of respondents favour a phase-out of nuclear power in Japan.
Why have alarms not been sounded about radiation exposure in the US?
Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was senator. Exelon has donated more than $269,000 to his political campaigns, thus far. Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.
Dr Shoji Sawada is a theoretical particle physicist and Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in Japan.
He is concerned about the types of nuclear plants in his country, and the fact that most of them are of US design.
"Most of the reactors in Japan were designed by US companies who did not care for the effects of earthquakes," Dr Sawada told Al Jazeera. "I think this problem applies to all nuclear power stations across Japan."
Using nuclear power to produce electricity in Japan is a product of the nuclear policy of the US, something Dr Sawada feels is also a large component of the problem.
"Most of the Japanese scientists at that time, the mid-1950s, considered that the technology of nuclear energy was under development or not established enough, and that it was too early to be put to practical use," he explained. "The Japan Scientists Council recommended the Japanese government not use this technology yet, but the government accepted to use enriched uranium to fuel nuclear power stations, and was thus subjected to US government policy."
As a 13-year-old, Dr Sawada experienced the US nuclear attack against Japan from his home, situated just 1400 metres from the hypocentre of the Hiroshima bomb.
"I think the Fukushima accident has caused the Japanese people to abandon the myth that nuclear power stations are safe," he said. "Now the opinions of the Japanese people have rapidly changed. Well beyond half the population believes Japan should move towards natural electricity."
A problem of infinite proportions
Dr Ramana expects the plant reactors and fuel cores to be cooled enough for a shutdown within two years.
"But it is going to take a very long time before the fuel can be removed from the reactor," he added. "Dealing with the cracking and compromised structure and dealing with radiation in the area will take several years, there's no question about that."
Dr Sawada is not as clear about how long a cold shutdown could take, and said the problem will be "the effects from caesium-137 that remains in the soil and the polluted water around the power station and underground. It will take a year, or more time, to deal with this".
Gundersen pointed out that the units are still leaking radiation.
"They are still emitting radioactive gases and an enormous amount of radioactive liquid," he said. "It will be at least a year before it stops boiling, and until it stops boiling, it's going to be cranking out radioactive steam and liquids."
Gundersen worries about more earthquake aftershocks, as well as how to cool two of the units.
"Unit four is the most dangerous, it could topple," he said. "After the earthquake in Sumatra there was an 8.6 [aftershock] about 90 days later, so we are not out of the woods yet. And you're at a point where, if that happens, there is no science for this, no one has ever imagined having hot nuclear fuel lying outside the fuel pool. They've not figured out how to cool units three and four."
Gundersen's assessment of solving this crisis is grim.
"Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor."
Dr Sawada says that the creation of nuclear fission generates radioactive materials for which there is simply no knowledge informing us how to dispose of the radioactive waste safely.
"Until we know how to safely dispose of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear plants, we should postpone these activities so as not to cause further harm to future generations," he explained. "To do otherwise is simply an immoral act, and that is my belief, both as a scientist and as a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing."
Gundersen believes it will take experts at least ten years to design and implement the plan.
"So ten to 15 years from now maybe we can say the reactors have been dismantled, and in the meantime you wind up contaminating the water," Gundersen said. "We are already seeing Strontium [at] 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come."
Unfortunately, the history of nuclear disasters appears to back Gundersen's assessment.
"With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started," he said, "But they never end."
© 2011 Al-Jazeera-English
White House Defends US Role in Libya after Lawmakers Sue by Steven Thomma and David Lightman WASHINGTON —
Facing growing opposition on Capitol Hill, the White House insisted Wednesday that it's within its legal rights to wage war in Libya without explicit authorization from Congress, essentially because no American lives are at risk.
The administration argued that its limited role in the allied air campaign against Libya means it's not really the kind of escalating war that would require approval from Congress or an end to fighting after 60 days under the War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973 in response to the Vietnam War.
Even before the White House could sent its arguments to Capitol Hill, 10 members of the House of Representatives — conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats — filed suit in U.S. District Court Wednesday challenging President Barack Obama's right to wage the war, even if in a supporting role.
"We believe the law was violated," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, one of the effort's leaders. "We have asked the courts to protect the American people from the results of these illegal policies."
In a 32-page report to Congress, the White House laid out its argument.
"U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors," the White House said.
"We're now in a position where we're operating in a support role," said a senior Obama administration official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity under White House policy.
"We're not engaged in sustained fighting. There's been no exchange of fire with hostile forces. We don't have troops on the ground. We don't risk casualties to those troops. None of the factors, frankly, speaking more broadly, has risked the sort of escalation that Congress was concerned would impinge on its war-making power," the official said.
The White House also warned Congress against questioning the U.S. commitment at a time when Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi may be on his way out. "Now is not the time to send mixed messages," said spokesman Jay Carney.
The White House report also said the U.S. has spent $716 million through June 3 on bombs and other supplies since helping launch the allied air campaign on March 19, a cost expected to rise to $1.1 billion by Sept. 30. Aides said the money would come from other appropriated funds and would not require a new appropriation from Congress this year.
It was unclear how the memo would impact the debate in Congress over the military campaign.
"The creative arguments made by the White House raise a number of questions that must be further explored," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
"Regardless, the commander-in-chief has a responsibility to articulate how U.S. military action is vital to our national security and consistent with American policy goals. With Libya, the president has fallen short on this obligation. We will review the information that was provided today, but hope and expect that this will serve as the beginning, not the end, of the president's explanation for continued American operations in Libya."
The lawmakers who filed suit maintained that a president cannot "unilaterally go to war in Libya and other countries" without a formal declaration of war from Congress. Their suit also maintains that a president cannot commit this country to a war "under the authority of the United Nations without authorization from Congress."
And, it said, the White House cannot use previously allocated federal funds for "an unconstitutional and unauthorized war in Libya or other countries."
Beyond Kucinich, House members filing the suit included Reps. Walter Jones, R-N.C., Howard Coble, R-N.C., John Duncan, R-Tenn., Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., John Conyers, D-Mich., Ron Paul, R-Texas, Michael Capuano, D-Mass., Tim Johnson, R-Ill., and Dan Burton, R-Ind.
Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Obama is required to consult with Congress before acting. He did inform lawmakers of his Libya decision on March 18, the day before the mission began. Under the resolution, Congress must approve any military action within 60 to 90 days, or it's canceled. The 60th day came and went last month, but the Libya mission continues.
The lawmakers' lawsuit isn't likely to succeed, according to Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
He noted that similar lawsuits during the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton presidencies were dismissed by the same court, and that the court is bound by those precedents. A key reason, he said, is that Congress already has the power to stop financing military action.
Kucinich earlier led an unsuccessful effort to get the House to call for a U.S. pullout from NATO's Libya operation within 15 days of passage; it failed by 265-148 on June 3, with 87 Republicans and 60 other Democrats supporting Kucinich.
Instead, the House passed a diluted measure, backed by Boehner, giving Obama until Friday to justify his Libya decision.
Boehner's resolution warned the White House that Congress "has the constitutional prerogative to withhold funding for any unauthorized use of the United States Armed Forces, including for unauthorized activities regarding Libya."
The Senate, where lawmakers from both parties have also expressed qualms about the White House action in Libya, has delayed an anticipated debate, awaiting the report Boehner's resolution requires.
The administration argued that its limited role in the allied air campaign against Libya means it's not really the kind of escalating war that would require approval from Congress or an end to fighting after 60 days under the War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973 in response to the Vietnam War.
Even before the White House could sent its arguments to Capitol Hill, 10 members of the House of Representatives — conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats — filed suit in U.S. District Court Wednesday challenging President Barack Obama's right to wage the war, even if in a supporting role.
"We believe the law was violated," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, one of the effort's leaders. "We have asked the courts to protect the American people from the results of these illegal policies."
In a 32-page report to Congress, the White House laid out its argument.
"U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors," the White House said.
"We're now in a position where we're operating in a support role," said a senior Obama administration official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity under White House policy.
"We're not engaged in sustained fighting. There's been no exchange of fire with hostile forces. We don't have troops on the ground. We don't risk casualties to those troops. None of the factors, frankly, speaking more broadly, has risked the sort of escalation that Congress was concerned would impinge on its war-making power," the official said.
The White House also warned Congress against questioning the U.S. commitment at a time when Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi may be on his way out. "Now is not the time to send mixed messages," said spokesman Jay Carney.
The White House report also said the U.S. has spent $716 million through June 3 on bombs and other supplies since helping launch the allied air campaign on March 19, a cost expected to rise to $1.1 billion by Sept. 30. Aides said the money would come from other appropriated funds and would not require a new appropriation from Congress this year.
It was unclear how the memo would impact the debate in Congress over the military campaign.
"The creative arguments made by the White House raise a number of questions that must be further explored," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
"Regardless, the commander-in-chief has a responsibility to articulate how U.S. military action is vital to our national security and consistent with American policy goals. With Libya, the president has fallen short on this obligation. We will review the information that was provided today, but hope and expect that this will serve as the beginning, not the end, of the president's explanation for continued American operations in Libya."
The lawmakers who filed suit maintained that a president cannot "unilaterally go to war in Libya and other countries" without a formal declaration of war from Congress. Their suit also maintains that a president cannot commit this country to a war "under the authority of the United Nations without authorization from Congress."
And, it said, the White House cannot use previously allocated federal funds for "an unconstitutional and unauthorized war in Libya or other countries."
Beyond Kucinich, House members filing the suit included Reps. Walter Jones, R-N.C., Howard Coble, R-N.C., John Duncan, R-Tenn., Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., John Conyers, D-Mich., Ron Paul, R-Texas, Michael Capuano, D-Mass., Tim Johnson, R-Ill., and Dan Burton, R-Ind.
Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Obama is required to consult with Congress before acting. He did inform lawmakers of his Libya decision on March 18, the day before the mission began. Under the resolution, Congress must approve any military action within 60 to 90 days, or it's canceled. The 60th day came and went last month, but the Libya mission continues.
The lawmakers' lawsuit isn't likely to succeed, according to Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
He noted that similar lawsuits during the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton presidencies were dismissed by the same court, and that the court is bound by those precedents. A key reason, he said, is that Congress already has the power to stop financing military action.
Kucinich earlier led an unsuccessful effort to get the House to call for a U.S. pullout from NATO's Libya operation within 15 days of passage; it failed by 265-148 on June 3, with 87 Republicans and 60 other Democrats supporting Kucinich.
Instead, the House passed a diluted measure, backed by Boehner, giving Obama until Friday to justify his Libya decision.
Boehner's resolution warned the White House that Congress "has the constitutional prerogative to withhold funding for any unauthorized use of the United States Armed Forces, including for unauthorized activities regarding Libya."
The Senate, where lawmakers from both parties have also expressed qualms about the White House action in Libya, has delayed an anticipated debate, awaiting the report Boehner's resolution requires.
© 2011 McClatchy Newspapers
Are We on the Brink of Burying Nuke Power Forever? by Harvey Wasserman This may be the moment history has turned definitively against atomic energy.
To be sure: we are still required to fight hard to bury reactor loan guarantees in the United States. There are parallel struggles in China, Indian, England, France and South Korea.
The great fear is that until every single reactor on this planet is shut, none of us is really safe from another radioactive horror show.
Thus the moment is clearly marked at Fukushima by three reactors and a radioactive fuel pool still untamed after three months, with the horrific potential to do far more apocalyptic damage than we've seen even to date.
That image includes Japanese school children being issued Geiger counters to carry with them 24/7.
And Fukushima's radiation raining down on the United States, with links to reports of a heightened infant death rate in Seattle.
And by countless other on-going disasters and near-misses at reactors everywhere on the planet. Included is Fort Calhoun, in Nebraska, which got zero corporate media coverage as it was nearly flooded and did lose power to its radioactive fuel pool.
From well-reasoned fear, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Israel and other critical players have announced they will build no more reactors. Some will start shutting the ones they have.
Japan and Germany are the third and fourth largest economies on Earth. Japan has long been at the core of the reactor industry. Germany's economy is the largest in Europe. Some European nations are rumbling about an alliance to shut the reactors among their nuclear neighbors.
All this could be happening merely in reaction to yet another Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The corporate media has attempted to induce a coma over Fukushima by simply refusing the cover the on-going disaster.
But the worsening realities are as utterly relentless as they are terrifying. In the age of the internet, there is simply no way to totally suppress the horror of what is happening to our Earth, especially at its lethal, festering wound at Fukushima.
But what truly sets this moment apart is not just the radioactive nightmare. There have been others. There will certainly be more.
What's unique about now is the Solartopian flip side. It is the irrepressible fact that we have finally reached the green-powered tipping point.
For the first time in history, the financial, industrial and trade journals are filled with pithy, number-laden reports declaring the moment has come---and this can not be overemphasized---that solar power is definitively cheaper than nuclear.
It is an epic moment that future economic and technological historians will note as a true turning point.
In real terms, Solartopian technology----wind, solar, geothermal, ocean thermal, bio-fuels, wave, current, tidal, efficiency, conservation---has always been cheaper than nukes.
The “Peaceful Atom” has always been a creature of subsidies, a happy face painted on the Bomb. Its true health, safety and environmental costs can never be reliably calculated.
What, after all, will be the true price tag on Fukushima? How do we begin to calculate the costs in human agony and ecological destruction?
Already Japan is being torn apart by who will pay: the utility (it doesn't have enough assets), the government (it could go bankrupt) or the victims (who else?). The only thing certain is this once-powerful industrial nation will never recover.
It's no accident the reactor industry cannot get private capital for new reactor construction, or private liability insurance of real consequence, and cannot solve its waste problems without the federal government taking responsibility---which, in truth, even it cannot do.
The true installment cost of the US reactor fleet can't even be calculated, as much of the liability was dishonestly wiped off the books in the deregulation scam of 1999-2002.
What we're left with worldwide is 440 uninsured ticking time bombs, potential Chernobyls and Fukushimas, every one of them. There are 104 in the US. The only real question is when the next one will go off and how long it will take to actually hear about it.
Atomic energy also feeds global warming. Who will account for the enormous heat still rising from Fukushima? How much did Chernobyl spew? Carbon emissions come with the mining, milling, enrichment and ultimate disposal of radioactive fuel, not to mention the building and dismantling of the reactors themselves.
For yet another summer, nukes in France, Alabama and elsewhere must close because the infernal machines that “fight global warming” must shut shy of heating the rivers they use for cooling to 90 degrees Farenheit.
What's peaked now, as Fukushima melts and burns and dumps its radioactive poisons into the air and the oceans and the people of this planet, is one financial reality: even with all its subsidies, nuclear power can no longer stand in the market place.
The first option, of course, has become natural gas, whose price has plummeted. But the gas boom is based in large part on fracking, an unsustainable environmental disaster. Its momentum is huge, but so is its threat to the waters we need to survive.
In the long term, the future is with renewables. They are often subsidized as well. But the scale is not comparable, and does not fully compensate for the hidden realities of atomic power's uninsurability and its inability to solve its basic waste, health and eco-impacts.
Were the nuclear industry forced to fully insure itself, or were it charged the true cost of its invested capital, or what it does to the planet and the humans who live on it, not a single reactor owner could afford to keep a reactor running for a single day.
Small wonder Wall Street has long been more anti-nuclear than Main Street.
The numbers are now easy to find. WorldWatch has just issued the definitive End of Nuclear by Mycle Schneider, laden with charts, graphs, tables and all the financial data anyone needs to confirm the case. The Rocky Mountain Institute has long had similar material on file and at the tip of Amory Lovins's tongue.
Now we see Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the core corporate press conceding the obvious.
In short, the bottom line has now become the bottom line. Reactor costs have doubled and tripled in the past few years even before Fukushima. Green energy costs continue to plummet.
The last barrier is that to understand how a Solartopian economy works, you have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Base-load power is readily available from geo-thermal, bio-fuels and a broad mix. One does need to balance the various intermittent sources---wind, solar, tidal---to keep the glass full.
But Fukushima has shown that nukes are also intermittent in the worst imaginable way.
Any sane for-profit player with the bucks enough to build a new reactor will now put them into renewables. Witness Google, now investing $280 million in a fund for installing solar panels on home rooftops, and millions more for undersea links to offshore wind farms.
The dream of a Solartopian future has become the capitalist present. Germany and Japan would not be committing to a green-powered future if its large corporations---Siemans, Enercon, Mitsubishi, Sharp---whose CEOs have run the numbers and decided nukes are a loser. And that the real profit center for the long-term energy biz is in green power.
What remains for us is to get the government out of the game. The $36 billion in loan guarantees Obama wants in the 2012 budget must come out. We need to call the White House and Congress constantly until this happens.
Then we need to find a way to get the Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Brits and French to join Germany, Japan and the rest of us in a post-nuclear world.
How soon this gets done is up to us. Our fervent hope---and greatest incentive---is knowing this must be done before the next Fukushima strikes.
The great fear is that until every single reactor on this planet is shut, none of us is really safe from another radioactive horror show.
Thus the moment is clearly marked at Fukushima by three reactors and a radioactive fuel pool still untamed after three months, with the horrific potential to do far more apocalyptic damage than we've seen even to date.
That image includes Japanese school children being issued Geiger counters to carry with them 24/7.
And Fukushima's radiation raining down on the United States, with links to reports of a heightened infant death rate in Seattle.
And by countless other on-going disasters and near-misses at reactors everywhere on the planet. Included is Fort Calhoun, in Nebraska, which got zero corporate media coverage as it was nearly flooded and did lose power to its radioactive fuel pool.
From well-reasoned fear, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Israel and other critical players have announced they will build no more reactors. Some will start shutting the ones they have.
Japan and Germany are the third and fourth largest economies on Earth. Japan has long been at the core of the reactor industry. Germany's economy is the largest in Europe. Some European nations are rumbling about an alliance to shut the reactors among their nuclear neighbors.
All this could be happening merely in reaction to yet another Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The corporate media has attempted to induce a coma over Fukushima by simply refusing the cover the on-going disaster.
But the worsening realities are as utterly relentless as they are terrifying. In the age of the internet, there is simply no way to totally suppress the horror of what is happening to our Earth, especially at its lethal, festering wound at Fukushima.
But what truly sets this moment apart is not just the radioactive nightmare. There have been others. There will certainly be more.
What's unique about now is the Solartopian flip side. It is the irrepressible fact that we have finally reached the green-powered tipping point.
For the first time in history, the financial, industrial and trade journals are filled with pithy, number-laden reports declaring the moment has come---and this can not be overemphasized---that solar power is definitively cheaper than nuclear.
It is an epic moment that future economic and technological historians will note as a true turning point.
In real terms, Solartopian technology----wind, solar, geothermal, ocean thermal, bio-fuels, wave, current, tidal, efficiency, conservation---has always been cheaper than nukes.
The “Peaceful Atom” has always been a creature of subsidies, a happy face painted on the Bomb. Its true health, safety and environmental costs can never be reliably calculated.
What, after all, will be the true price tag on Fukushima? How do we begin to calculate the costs in human agony and ecological destruction?
Already Japan is being torn apart by who will pay: the utility (it doesn't have enough assets), the government (it could go bankrupt) or the victims (who else?). The only thing certain is this once-powerful industrial nation will never recover.
It's no accident the reactor industry cannot get private capital for new reactor construction, or private liability insurance of real consequence, and cannot solve its waste problems without the federal government taking responsibility---which, in truth, even it cannot do.
The true installment cost of the US reactor fleet can't even be calculated, as much of the liability was dishonestly wiped off the books in the deregulation scam of 1999-2002.
What we're left with worldwide is 440 uninsured ticking time bombs, potential Chernobyls and Fukushimas, every one of them. There are 104 in the US. The only real question is when the next one will go off and how long it will take to actually hear about it.
Atomic energy also feeds global warming. Who will account for the enormous heat still rising from Fukushima? How much did Chernobyl spew? Carbon emissions come with the mining, milling, enrichment and ultimate disposal of radioactive fuel, not to mention the building and dismantling of the reactors themselves.
For yet another summer, nukes in France, Alabama and elsewhere must close because the infernal machines that “fight global warming” must shut shy of heating the rivers they use for cooling to 90 degrees Farenheit.
What's peaked now, as Fukushima melts and burns and dumps its radioactive poisons into the air and the oceans and the people of this planet, is one financial reality: even with all its subsidies, nuclear power can no longer stand in the market place.
The first option, of course, has become natural gas, whose price has plummeted. But the gas boom is based in large part on fracking, an unsustainable environmental disaster. Its momentum is huge, but so is its threat to the waters we need to survive.
In the long term, the future is with renewables. They are often subsidized as well. But the scale is not comparable, and does not fully compensate for the hidden realities of atomic power's uninsurability and its inability to solve its basic waste, health and eco-impacts.
Were the nuclear industry forced to fully insure itself, or were it charged the true cost of its invested capital, or what it does to the planet and the humans who live on it, not a single reactor owner could afford to keep a reactor running for a single day.
Small wonder Wall Street has long been more anti-nuclear than Main Street.
The numbers are now easy to find. WorldWatch has just issued the definitive End of Nuclear by Mycle Schneider, laden with charts, graphs, tables and all the financial data anyone needs to confirm the case. The Rocky Mountain Institute has long had similar material on file and at the tip of Amory Lovins's tongue.
Now we see Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the core corporate press conceding the obvious.
In short, the bottom line has now become the bottom line. Reactor costs have doubled and tripled in the past few years even before Fukushima. Green energy costs continue to plummet.
The last barrier is that to understand how a Solartopian economy works, you have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Base-load power is readily available from geo-thermal, bio-fuels and a broad mix. One does need to balance the various intermittent sources---wind, solar, tidal---to keep the glass full.
But Fukushima has shown that nukes are also intermittent in the worst imaginable way.
Any sane for-profit player with the bucks enough to build a new reactor will now put them into renewables. Witness Google, now investing $280 million in a fund for installing solar panels on home rooftops, and millions more for undersea links to offshore wind farms.
The dream of a Solartopian future has become the capitalist present. Germany and Japan would not be committing to a green-powered future if its large corporations---Siemans, Enercon, Mitsubishi, Sharp---whose CEOs have run the numbers and decided nukes are a loser. And that the real profit center for the long-term energy biz is in green power.
What remains for us is to get the government out of the game. The $36 billion in loan guarantees Obama wants in the 2012 budget must come out. We need to call the White House and Congress constantly until this happens.
Then we need to find a way to get the Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Brits and French to join Germany, Japan and the rest of us in a post-nuclear world.
How soon this gets done is up to us. Our fervent hope---and greatest incentive---is knowing this must be done before the next Fukushima strikes.
Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. His Solartopia Green Power Hour runs at www.talktainmentradio.com. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org. He and Bob Fitrakis have co-authored four books on election protection, including Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?, As Goes Ohio: Election Theft Since 2004 , How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, and What Happened in Ohio
more Harvey Wasserman
Fire's Manifest Destiny The American West in Flames By CHIP WARD
Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario. It's happening right here, right now.
Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained "zero contained" for most of last week and only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not your grandfather's forest fires.
Because the burn area in eastern Arizona is sparsely populated, damage to property so far has been minimal compared to, say, wildfire destruction in California, where the interface of civilization and wilderness is growing ever more crowded. However, the devastation to life in the fire zone, from microbiotic communities that hold soil and crucial nutrients in place to more popular species like deer, elk, bear, fish, and birds -- already hard-pressed to cope with the rapidity of climate change -- will be catastrophic.
The vastness of the American West holds rainforests, deserts, and everything in between, so weather patterns and moisture vary. Nonetheless, we have been experiencing a historic drought for about a decade in significant parts of the region. As topsoil dries out, microbial dynamics change and native plants either die or move uphill toward cooler temperatures and more moisture. Wildlife that depends on the seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follows the plants -- if it can.
Plants and animals are usually able to adapt to slow and steady changes in their habitat, but rapid and uncertain seasonal transformations in weather patterns mean that the timing for such basic ecological processes as seed germination, pollination, migration, and hibernation is also disrupted. The challenge of adapting to such fundamental changes can be overwhelming.
And if evolving at warp speed (while Mother Nature experiences hot flashes) isn't enough, plants, animals, and birds are struggling within previously reduced and fragmented habitats. In other words, wildlife already thrown off the mothership now finds the lifeboats, those remnants of their former habitats, on fire. Sometimes extinction happens with a whimper, sometimes with a crackle and a blast.
As for the humans in this drama, I can tell you from personal experience that thousands of people in Arizona and New Mexico are living in fear. A forest fire is a monster you can see. It looks over your shoulder 24 hours a day for days on end. You pack your most precious possessions, gather necessary documents, and point your car or truck toward the road for a quick get-away. If you have a trailer, you load and hitch it. If you have pets or large animals like a horse, cattle, or sheep, you think of how you're going to get them to safety. If you have elderly neighbors or family in the area, you check on them.
And as you wait, watch, and worry, you choke on smoke, rub itching eyes, and sneeze fitfully. After a couple of days of that omnipresent smoke, almost everyone you meet has a headache. You know that when it is over, even if you're among the lucky ones whose homes still stand, you will witness and share in the suffering of neighbors and mourn the loss of cherished places, of shaded streams and flowered meadows, grand vistas, and the lost aroma of the deep woods.
Cue the Inferno
These past few years, mega-fires in the West have become ever more routine. Though their estimates and measurements may vary, the experts who study these phenomena all agree that wildfires today are bigger, last longer, and are more frequent. A big fire used to burn perhaps 30 square miles. Today, wildfires regularly scorch 150-square-mile areas.
Global warming, global weirding, climate change -- whatever you prefer to call it -- is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It's here now.
The seas have warmed, ice caps are melting, and the old reliable ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams are jumping their tracks. The harbingers of a warming planet and the abruptly shifting weather patterns that result vary across the American landscape. Along the vast Mississippi River drainage in the heartland of America, epic floods, like our wildfires in the West, are becoming more frequent. In the Gulf states, it's monster hurricanes and in the Midwest, swarms of killer tornadoes signal that things have changed. In the East it's those killer heat waves and record-breaking blizzards.
But in the West, we just burn.
Although Western politicians like to blame the dire situation on tree-hugging environmentalists who bring suit to keep loggers from thinning and harvesting the crowded forests, the big picture is far more complicated. According to Wally Covington of Northern Arizona University, a renowned forest ecologist, the problem has been building towards a catastrophe for decades.
Historically, Western forests were relatively thin, and grasses, light shrubs, and wildflowers thrived under their canopies. Fires would move through every few years, clearing the accumulated undergrowth and resetting the successional clock. Fire, that is, was an ecological process. Then, in the 1880s, cattle were brought in to graze the native grasses under the forest canopy. As the grass disappeared, fires were limited and smaller trees were able to mature until the land became overcrowded. Invasive species like highly flammable cheat grass also moved in, carried there and distributed in cow dung. Then, foresters began suppressing fires to protect the over-stocked timber that generated revenues and profits.
All this set the stage for catastrophe. Next, a decade of drought weakened millions of trees, making them susceptible to voracious beetles that gnaw them to death. Warmer air carries more moisture, so winters, while wetter than normal, are not as cold. Typical temperatures, in fact, have become mild enough that the beetles, once killed by wintry deep freezes, are now often able to survive until spring, which means that their range is expanding dramatically. Now, thanks to them, whole mountainsides across the west have turned from green to brown.
Finally, spring runoff that used to happen over three months now sometimes comes down torrentially in a single month, which means that the forests are dry longer. Even our lovely iconic stands of aspen trees are dying on parched south-facing slopes. Cue the inferno.
If you live in the West, you can't help wonder what will burn next. Eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas are, at present, deep in drought and likely candidates. Montana's Lodgepole Pine forests are dying and ready to ignite. Colorado's Grand Mesa is another drying forest area that could go up in flames anytime. Wally Covington estimates that a total of about half-a-million square miles of Western forests, an area three times the size of California, is now at risk of catastrophic fires. As ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger observed in 2008 when it was California's turn to burn, the fire season is now 365 days long.
The Fire Next Time
That may explain why "smoke season" began so early this year, overlapping the spring flood season. Texas and other Western states may be drying up and readying themselves to blow dust your way, but in Utah, where I live, it was an extremely wet winter. Watersheds here are at 200% to 700% of the normal snowpack ("normal" being an ever more problematic concept out here). Spring weather has become increasingly weird and unpredictable. Last year we had record-breaking heat and early monsoons in May. This year it was unusually cold and damp. The mountains held on to all that accumulating snow, which is now melting quickly and heading downhill all at once.
So although skiers are still riding the mountain slopes of northern Utah, river-rafting guides in the south, famous for their hunger for whitewater excitement, are cancelling trips on the Colorado and Green Rivers because they are flowing so hard and high that navigating them is too risky to try. In our more sedate settings, suburbs and such, sandbags are now ubiquitous. Basement pumps are humming across the state. Reservoirs were emptied ahead of the floods so that they could be refilled with excess runoff, but there is enough snowmelt in our mountains this year to fill them seven times over. Utah Governor Gary Herbert went on television to urge parents to keep children away from fast-moving streams that might sweep them away. Seven children have nonetheless drowned in the past two weeks.
The old gospel got it mostly right when God told Noah, "No more water, the fire next time." In the West we know that it is not actually a question of either/or, because they go together. First, floods fuel growth, then growth fuels fires, then fires fuel floods. So all that unexpected, unpredicted moisture we got this winter will translate into a fresh layer of lush undergrowth in forests that until very recently were drying up, ravaged by beetles, and dying. You may visit us this summer and see all that new green vegetation as so much beautiful scenery, but we know it is also a ticking tinderbox. If Mother Nature flips her fickle toggle switch back to hot and dry, as she surely will, fire will follow.
When fire removes trees, brush, and grasses that absorb spring runoff and slow the flow, the next round of floods is accelerated. If the fire is intense enough to bake soils into a water-resistant crust, the next floods will start landslides and muddy rivers. The silt from all that erosion will clog reservoirs, reducing their capacity both to store water and to mitigate floods. That's how a self-reinforcing feedback loop works. Back in the days when our weather was far more benign and predictable, this dynamic relationship between fire and flood was predictable and manageable. Today, it is not.
It may be hard to draw a direct line of cause and effect between global warming (or weirding) and a chain of tornadoes sawing through Joplin, while the record-breaking blizzards of 2011 may seem to contradict the very notion that the planet is getting hotter. But the droughts, pestilence, and fires we are experiencing in the West are logical and obvious signs that the planet is overheating. We would be wise and prudent to pay attention and act boldly.
Biological diversity, ecological services like pollination and water filtration, and the powerful global currents of wind and water are the operating systems of all life on Earth, including humans. For thousands of years, we have depended on benign and predictable weather patterns that generally vary modestly from year to year. The agricultural system that has fed us since the dawn of history was based on a climate and seasonal swings that were familiar and expectable.
Ask any farmer if he can grow grain without rain or plant seeds in a flooded field. Signs that life's operating systems are swinging chaotically from one extreme to another should be a wake-up call to make real plans to kick our carbon-based energy addictions while conserving and restoring ecosystems under stress.
In the process, we'll need a new vision of who we are and what we are about. For many generations we believed that developing westward, one frontier after the next, was the nation's Manifest Destiny. We eliminated the Indians and the bison in our way, broke the prairies with our plows, dammed raging rivers, piped the captured water to make the desert bloom, and eventually filled the valleys with cities, suburbs, and roads.
The Wild West was tamed. In fact, we didn't hesitate to overload its carrying capacity by over-allocating precious water for such dubious purposes as growing rice in Arizona or building spectacular fountains and golf courses in Las Vegas. We used the deserts near my Utah home as a dumping ground for toxic and radioactive wastes from far-away industrial operations. The sacrifice zones in the Great Basin Desert where we tested bombs and missiles helped our military project the power that underpinned an empire. The iconic landscapes of the West even inspired us to think that we were exceptional and brave in ways not common to humanity, and so were not subject to the limitations of other peoples -- or even of nature itself.
But whatever we preferred to think, the limits have always been there. Nature has only so much fresh water, fertile soil, timber, and oil. The atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon dioxide and stay benign and predictable. When you overload the carrying capacity of your environment, there is hell to pay, which means that monster fires are here to stay.
After the American West was conquered, tamed, used, and abused, the frontier of our civilizing ambitions moved abroad, was subsumed by a Cold War, was assigned to outer space, and now drives a Humvee through places like Iraq and Afghanistan. On an overheating planet, if the West is still our place of desire and exception, then fire is our modern manifest destiny -- and the West is ours to lose.
Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained "zero contained" for most of last week and only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not your grandfather's forest fires.
Because the burn area in eastern Arizona is sparsely populated, damage to property so far has been minimal compared to, say, wildfire destruction in California, where the interface of civilization and wilderness is growing ever more crowded. However, the devastation to life in the fire zone, from microbiotic communities that hold soil and crucial nutrients in place to more popular species like deer, elk, bear, fish, and birds -- already hard-pressed to cope with the rapidity of climate change -- will be catastrophic.
The vastness of the American West holds rainforests, deserts, and everything in between, so weather patterns and moisture vary. Nonetheless, we have been experiencing a historic drought for about a decade in significant parts of the region. As topsoil dries out, microbial dynamics change and native plants either die or move uphill toward cooler temperatures and more moisture. Wildlife that depends on the seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follows the plants -- if it can.
Plants and animals are usually able to adapt to slow and steady changes in their habitat, but rapid and uncertain seasonal transformations in weather patterns mean that the timing for such basic ecological processes as seed germination, pollination, migration, and hibernation is also disrupted. The challenge of adapting to such fundamental changes can be overwhelming.
And if evolving at warp speed (while Mother Nature experiences hot flashes) isn't enough, plants, animals, and birds are struggling within previously reduced and fragmented habitats. In other words, wildlife already thrown off the mothership now finds the lifeboats, those remnants of their former habitats, on fire. Sometimes extinction happens with a whimper, sometimes with a crackle and a blast.
As for the humans in this drama, I can tell you from personal experience that thousands of people in Arizona and New Mexico are living in fear. A forest fire is a monster you can see. It looks over your shoulder 24 hours a day for days on end. You pack your most precious possessions, gather necessary documents, and point your car or truck toward the road for a quick get-away. If you have a trailer, you load and hitch it. If you have pets or large animals like a horse, cattle, or sheep, you think of how you're going to get them to safety. If you have elderly neighbors or family in the area, you check on them.
And as you wait, watch, and worry, you choke on smoke, rub itching eyes, and sneeze fitfully. After a couple of days of that omnipresent smoke, almost everyone you meet has a headache. You know that when it is over, even if you're among the lucky ones whose homes still stand, you will witness and share in the suffering of neighbors and mourn the loss of cherished places, of shaded streams and flowered meadows, grand vistas, and the lost aroma of the deep woods.
Cue the Inferno
These past few years, mega-fires in the West have become ever more routine. Though their estimates and measurements may vary, the experts who study these phenomena all agree that wildfires today are bigger, last longer, and are more frequent. A big fire used to burn perhaps 30 square miles. Today, wildfires regularly scorch 150-square-mile areas.
Global warming, global weirding, climate change -- whatever you prefer to call it -- is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It's here now.
The seas have warmed, ice caps are melting, and the old reliable ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams are jumping their tracks. The harbingers of a warming planet and the abruptly shifting weather patterns that result vary across the American landscape. Along the vast Mississippi River drainage in the heartland of America, epic floods, like our wildfires in the West, are becoming more frequent. In the Gulf states, it's monster hurricanes and in the Midwest, swarms of killer tornadoes signal that things have changed. In the East it's those killer heat waves and record-breaking blizzards.
But in the West, we just burn.
Although Western politicians like to blame the dire situation on tree-hugging environmentalists who bring suit to keep loggers from thinning and harvesting the crowded forests, the big picture is far more complicated. According to Wally Covington of Northern Arizona University, a renowned forest ecologist, the problem has been building towards a catastrophe for decades.
Historically, Western forests were relatively thin, and grasses, light shrubs, and wildflowers thrived under their canopies. Fires would move through every few years, clearing the accumulated undergrowth and resetting the successional clock. Fire, that is, was an ecological process. Then, in the 1880s, cattle were brought in to graze the native grasses under the forest canopy. As the grass disappeared, fires were limited and smaller trees were able to mature until the land became overcrowded. Invasive species like highly flammable cheat grass also moved in, carried there and distributed in cow dung. Then, foresters began suppressing fires to protect the over-stocked timber that generated revenues and profits.
All this set the stage for catastrophe. Next, a decade of drought weakened millions of trees, making them susceptible to voracious beetles that gnaw them to death. Warmer air carries more moisture, so winters, while wetter than normal, are not as cold. Typical temperatures, in fact, have become mild enough that the beetles, once killed by wintry deep freezes, are now often able to survive until spring, which means that their range is expanding dramatically. Now, thanks to them, whole mountainsides across the west have turned from green to brown.
Finally, spring runoff that used to happen over three months now sometimes comes down torrentially in a single month, which means that the forests are dry longer. Even our lovely iconic stands of aspen trees are dying on parched south-facing slopes. Cue the inferno.
If you live in the West, you can't help wonder what will burn next. Eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas are, at present, deep in drought and likely candidates. Montana's Lodgepole Pine forests are dying and ready to ignite. Colorado's Grand Mesa is another drying forest area that could go up in flames anytime. Wally Covington estimates that a total of about half-a-million square miles of Western forests, an area three times the size of California, is now at risk of catastrophic fires. As ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger observed in 2008 when it was California's turn to burn, the fire season is now 365 days long.
The Fire Next Time
That may explain why "smoke season" began so early this year, overlapping the spring flood season. Texas and other Western states may be drying up and readying themselves to blow dust your way, but in Utah, where I live, it was an extremely wet winter. Watersheds here are at 200% to 700% of the normal snowpack ("normal" being an ever more problematic concept out here). Spring weather has become increasingly weird and unpredictable. Last year we had record-breaking heat and early monsoons in May. This year it was unusually cold and damp. The mountains held on to all that accumulating snow, which is now melting quickly and heading downhill all at once.
So although skiers are still riding the mountain slopes of northern Utah, river-rafting guides in the south, famous for their hunger for whitewater excitement, are cancelling trips on the Colorado and Green Rivers because they are flowing so hard and high that navigating them is too risky to try. In our more sedate settings, suburbs and such, sandbags are now ubiquitous. Basement pumps are humming across the state. Reservoirs were emptied ahead of the floods so that they could be refilled with excess runoff, but there is enough snowmelt in our mountains this year to fill them seven times over. Utah Governor Gary Herbert went on television to urge parents to keep children away from fast-moving streams that might sweep them away. Seven children have nonetheless drowned in the past two weeks.
The old gospel got it mostly right when God told Noah, "No more water, the fire next time." In the West we know that it is not actually a question of either/or, because they go together. First, floods fuel growth, then growth fuels fires, then fires fuel floods. So all that unexpected, unpredicted moisture we got this winter will translate into a fresh layer of lush undergrowth in forests that until very recently were drying up, ravaged by beetles, and dying. You may visit us this summer and see all that new green vegetation as so much beautiful scenery, but we know it is also a ticking tinderbox. If Mother Nature flips her fickle toggle switch back to hot and dry, as she surely will, fire will follow.
When fire removes trees, brush, and grasses that absorb spring runoff and slow the flow, the next round of floods is accelerated. If the fire is intense enough to bake soils into a water-resistant crust, the next floods will start landslides and muddy rivers. The silt from all that erosion will clog reservoirs, reducing their capacity both to store water and to mitigate floods. That's how a self-reinforcing feedback loop works. Back in the days when our weather was far more benign and predictable, this dynamic relationship between fire and flood was predictable and manageable. Today, it is not.
It may be hard to draw a direct line of cause and effect between global warming (or weirding) and a chain of tornadoes sawing through Joplin, while the record-breaking blizzards of 2011 may seem to contradict the very notion that the planet is getting hotter. But the droughts, pestilence, and fires we are experiencing in the West are logical and obvious signs that the planet is overheating. We would be wise and prudent to pay attention and act boldly.
Biological diversity, ecological services like pollination and water filtration, and the powerful global currents of wind and water are the operating systems of all life on Earth, including humans. For thousands of years, we have depended on benign and predictable weather patterns that generally vary modestly from year to year. The agricultural system that has fed us since the dawn of history was based on a climate and seasonal swings that were familiar and expectable.
Ask any farmer if he can grow grain without rain or plant seeds in a flooded field. Signs that life's operating systems are swinging chaotically from one extreme to another should be a wake-up call to make real plans to kick our carbon-based energy addictions while conserving and restoring ecosystems under stress.
In the process, we'll need a new vision of who we are and what we are about. For many generations we believed that developing westward, one frontier after the next, was the nation's Manifest Destiny. We eliminated the Indians and the bison in our way, broke the prairies with our plows, dammed raging rivers, piped the captured water to make the desert bloom, and eventually filled the valleys with cities, suburbs, and roads.
The Wild West was tamed. In fact, we didn't hesitate to overload its carrying capacity by over-allocating precious water for such dubious purposes as growing rice in Arizona or building spectacular fountains and golf courses in Las Vegas. We used the deserts near my Utah home as a dumping ground for toxic and radioactive wastes from far-away industrial operations. The sacrifice zones in the Great Basin Desert where we tested bombs and missiles helped our military project the power that underpinned an empire. The iconic landscapes of the West even inspired us to think that we were exceptional and brave in ways not common to humanity, and so were not subject to the limitations of other peoples -- or even of nature itself.
But whatever we preferred to think, the limits have always been there. Nature has only so much fresh water, fertile soil, timber, and oil. The atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon dioxide and stay benign and predictable. When you overload the carrying capacity of your environment, there is hell to pay, which means that monster fires are here to stay.
After the American West was conquered, tamed, used, and abused, the frontier of our civilizing ambitions moved abroad, was subsumed by a Cold War, was assigned to outer space, and now drives a Humvee through places like Iraq and Afghanistan. On an overheating planet, if the West is still our place of desire and exception, then fire is our modern manifest destiny -- and the West is ours to lose.
Chip Ward was a founder of HEAL Utah, a grassroots group that has led the opposition to the disposal of nuclear waste in Utah and the construction of a new reactor next to Green River. He is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West.
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
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