Fukushima: "Biggest Industrial Catastrophe'
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 kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.
A nuclear waste specialist stated that approximately 966 square kilometers near the power station are now uninhabitable. 966 square kilometers is 238,704 acres. Considering the fact that the reactor is sitting on the ocean, we can calculate the radius of a half circle with an area of 966 square kilometers thusly: 966 = .5 x π x r2. Solving for r, we get r = sqrt(966)/(.5xπ) = 24.8 km.
That means that everything within 24.8 km (15.4 miles) of the plant is uninhabitable. And since the damaged reactors are still emitting radioactive particles into the atmosphere, that radius will grow, although its direction of growth depends on the direction of the wind.
The U.S. mainstream media has been unusually quiet about the developing disaster to the west, even though the western United States has received substantial fallout. Researchers have already connected the fallout with a spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred in the ten weeks immediately following the disaster. In the case of NBC and MSNBC, the silence can possibly be attributed to the fact that GE, the manufacturer of the reactors in question, owns the two networks, but there is no excuse for the others not to take more interest. An accident described by an authority in the field as “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind” ought to be on the tongue of every anchorperson.
Read Dahr Jamail’s article in AlterNet.
USA Today's Economic Lolapalooza
For example, here’s the closing statement: “The government has promised pension and health benefits worth more than $700,000 per retired civil servant. The pension fund's key asset: federal IOUs.”
Considering that the “IOUs”—commonly referred to in the financial world as government paper or government bonds—are considered to be the soundest investment-grade instrument in the world, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, to the degree that investors are willing to pay a small negative interest in return for the safety of their investments, the idea that federal IOUs are somehow unsound is ludicrous. Where are the funds to be kept? In an underground vault a la Uncle Scrooge?
No, the owners of USA Today, like good plutocrats everywhere, want to reduce public goods like medical care, retirement security and infrastructure in order to reduce their obligations to society, and thus to become even richer and even meaner plutocrats. There is something about acquiring a fortune, either by hook, crook, luck or inheritance, that renders the possessor stingier, meaner, and less compassionate towards everyone else.
The Presidential Cocoon and Iran
in the article, I made the point that a president, if he is to be anything other than a passive tool of the permanent government, simply must have alternative sources of unfiltered information that enable him to evaluate the accuracy and relevance of the official channels. Given the ability of our intelligence agencies to monitor communications worldwide, however, it was equally apparent that recent presidents have been encountering extreme difficulty in acquiring independent intelligence. Roosevelt had personal channels he could tap in the certainty that his private conversations in person would remain private. John Kennedy, concerned that his conversations in the Oval Office were being listened to or recorded, often conducted his most private conversations in the Rose Garden. It is hard to imagine any place on earth that Obama could have a truly private one-to-one conversation without it being recorded, either by enemies or our own national intelligence agencies.
Now we have the journalistic legend, Seymour Hersh, writing in The New Yorker magazine that the national intelligence agencies are in rare agreement that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and instead of being relieved at the prospect of one less nation with weapons of mass destruction, the Obama White House is actually chagrined. But not so chagrined that the “two administration officials” and “a senior intelligence official” who responded in Politico.com didn’t insist on anonymity when they told Politico that the International Atomic Energy Agency had been given “new evidence” by its members that Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons.
Hersh has already replied on the radio show “Democracy Now” that the new evidence is not evidence and not even described as evidence by the IAEA. Click on this link for a transcript of the Hersh interview.
Glenn Greenwald scorches Politico for criticizing Hersh for using anonymous sources when it uses anonymous sources itself:
Dutifully writing down what government officials say and then publishing it under cover of anonymity is what media figures in D.C. refer to as "real reporting." But the most hilarious part of this orgy of cowardly anonymity comes at the end, when Politico explains what is supposedly the prime defect in Hersh’[s] journalism:
“Hersh has faced criticism for his heavy reliance on anonymous sources, but New Yorker editor David Remnick has repeatedly said he stands by his reporter’s work.”
That's the criticism that ends an article that relies exclusively on anonymous government sources, appearing in a D.C. gossip rag notorious for granting anonymity to any powerful figure who requests it for any or no reason. The difference, of course, is that the Pulitzer Prize-winning, five-time-Polk-Award-recipient investigative journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal grants anonymity to those who are challenging the official claims of those in power (that's called "journalism"), while Politico uses it (as it did here) to serve those in power and shield them from all accountability as they spew their propaganda (which is called being a "lowly, rank Royal Court propagandist”).
But back to the presidential cocoon. In the interview, Hersh confirmed my worst fears:
And I’ll tell you the biggest problem [Obama] has, as awful as those things are, as counterproductive, and as much as he’s following, oh, yes, Bush and Cheney in those policies—and I think the President—I’ll be writing about this—I think he was really sandbagged by the Pentagon after he got into office, when he was new and innocent. And I still think—I think right now—I would almost use the word "cult" to describe what’s going on in the White House. Everything is political. He’s isolated. Very good people say they’ve never seen a president this isolated, in terms of being unable to get to him with different opinions, etc. So [he’s] really captive of a few people there. I know this may sound strange, but I know what I’m talking about. You can’t get to the guy—and even, for example, Pickering, as competent as he is. And Pickering has done some wonderful stuff for the United States intelligence community undercover, and so he’s known as a trusted guy. Those guys who have been involved in talking to Iran off the record, Track II policy talks, for years can’t get to the President. He may not even know they’re looking for him. I just don’t know.
And so, here we have this very bright guy continuing insane policies that are counterproductive, do nothing for the United States, and meanwhile the real crisis is going to be about Iraq, because, whatever you’re hearing, Iraq is going bad.
When the president gets his economic advice from the very persons that assisted in destroying the economy (who then made fortunes in the process), his advice on the middle east from a rabid supporter of Greater Israel, and his military advice from a geriatric ward of cold warriors in bed with the military-industrial complex, it is entirely predictable that his view of reality will vary considerably from the facts on the ground, and that his decisions regarding both domestic and foreign policy will reflect their views. And as long as he cannot break out of this cocoon, he will continue implementing the policies that the permanent government desires.
Not a happy prospect for the rest of us. Or the nation as a whole.
Or the world.