#Fukushima Fallout, #Flyjin, and Freedom of Information

Source: Harvey Wasserman, Common Dreams "Documents Say Navy Knew Fukushima Dangerously Contaminated the USS Reagan" Feb 27, 2014

Peeking behind the curtain of President Obama's announced "pivot to the Pacific" we see the U.S. military operating in that region over the long haul. From the gunboat diplomacy that forced Japan to open its markets to U.S. commercial interests in 1853-4, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 followed by the Marshall plan, to the imposition of an enduring military footprint (the largest outside the U.S.) we see our tax dollars at work. 

These public expenditures make way for corporations like General Electric -- which has paid no taxes for the last five years -- to sell nuclear reactors to Japan, including the Dai-ichi reactors that exploded and melted down following the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 (aka 3.11).

Some citizens are aware that U.S. Navy personnel present off the coast of Japan near Fukushima during 3.11 are suing TEPCO, the company that operates the Dai-ichi plant, for $1 billion in compensation for illnesses they have developed. Eyewitnesses say the ship was several miles off the coast of Fukushima in a snowstorm when a warm cloud with a metallic taste enveloped them. The 71 sailors, most in their 20's, cannot by law sue the U.S. government for damages; their health symptoms include leukemias, random bleeding, thyroid troubles, polyps, and the loss of a testicle and an optic nerve.

Radioactive waste water continues to flow into the Pacific as you read this sentence.

Enter the Freedom of Information Act.

"Mobilizing Nuclear Bias" in the Feb. 17 issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus lays out who knew what when based on research by Kyle Cunningham, including information obtained via FOIA requests he filed. Cleveland also conducted "in-depth interviews with diplomats in foreign embassies, military officials, journalists, nuclear scientists and scholars." What emerges is a picture of Japanese government officials, mainstream journalists, and U.S. diplomats scrambling to cover up truth at the expense of getting people to safety.

All quotes are excerpts from Cunningham's groundbreaking report:

...in the first few days of the crisis, with little meaningful information being provided amidst the disorienting impact of the earthquake and tsunami, and TEPCO offering assurances that were uncritically passed on by the government and a docile press, hope remained that the situation could be brought under control. This wishful thinking was soon made irrational by the explosion of the outer containment structure of reactor #1, which was so powerful (the explosion broke windows 3km from the plant) that both plant workers inside the Daiichi complex and nuclear experts watching from afar initially believed that the reactor core itself had exploded. 

With the explosion of the reactor #1 building there was no doubting the significance of this crisis, but calibrating the actual risk and danger that this presented to the general public was a moving target, with competing risk narratives that developed almost immediately... 

In the first few days of the nuclear crisis the information made available to the public was confusing, contradictory and frustrating. Despite a massive explosion that destroyed the outer, secondary containment structure of the Daiichi reactor #1 building, soon to be followed on the next day by a similar explosion of the reactor #3 building, TEPCO insisted that the primary reactor core containment was intact and that there were no releases of radiation that posed a threat to public health. Initially, conjecture held sway, with the foreign media challenging the Japanese press corps, who did little more than pass along TEPCO's announcements, essentially serving as a PR agency for the utility.

Unfortunately, we in the U.S. are all too familiar with corporate media serving in this capacity for wealthy corporations and their public servants. The  U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, but declines to say how that is to be achieved when money controls communication channels. Japan, taking no chances, passed a highly controversial State Secrets Law in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

And as we have seen in debates over climate change, or the effects of genetically modified foods, science takes a backseat to crisis management when there are profits at stake.

For nuclear experts, the debate over whether or not meltdowns had occurred was largely a political controversy being played out in the echo chamber of the mass media, as it was taken as a given that significant meltdowns had started early in the trajectory of the reactor accident progression (TEPCO would later specify that within 8 hours after the loss of power, meltdowns had occurred) 

...while the media debated the relative chances of a meltdown and quibbled over the nomenclature, the nuclear experts who worked the crisis knew early on unambiguously that the Daiichi plant was in deep trouble.

Cunningham reports that U.S.military officials early on began gathering their own information and acting accordingly to protect their own interests. Social media outlets such as Twitter became important sources of scientific information as TEPCO and the Japanese government continued to minimize threats to public health. 

What U.S. officials knew may be surmised from this little-reported fact:

...while the official stated position maintained that radiation was near background levels in these locations and thus no danger to public health, D.O.D. dependents, including the families of embassy officials in Tokyo and at the U.S. Consulate in Nagoya were given support (the flights were free of charge) to leave Japan. Through a mission named "Operation Pacific Passage" approximately 7,800 D.O.D. dependents (including about 1,200 families) left Japan...

Expatriates without official connections were on their own to face decision making in a chaotic vacuum, with vastly inflated airline tickets costing up to $20,000.

“Fly-Jin” (a contraction variant of the Japanese word “Gaijin,” a derogatory slang for a foreigner)...were accused of using the crisis as an occasion to take a paid holiday while waiting out the crisis. This label had originated on Twitter feeds as a sarcastic pun, and came to be used more generally to describe foreigners who had abandoned Japan out of fear for personal safety.

Japanese citizens, meanwhile, in some cases evacuated directly into the radioactive flume due to a lack of accurate information from either TEPCO or their government. 

Residents of Namie near, who evacuated into the path of the plume. Mayor Tamotsu Baba has criticized the Japanese government for failing to communicate about how best to protect public health during the nuclear disaster.

Also, diplomatic relations with Japan were seen to preclude the sharing of information that foreigners had access to and were acting upon in moving their own personnel to safety.

...it took considerable finesse to implement procedures out of line with the Japanese official response while seeking to avoid the diplomatically troubling insinuation that these policies were an implicit critique of the Japanese government’s crisis management procedures.

Information wants to be free, and Kyle Cunningham has shared a lot of it. Too late to be of much use to people living near Fukushima, but that's not his fault.

 If,  like me, you're interested in the management of information for profit, it would be well worth your time to read the whole report.

Information Control Ramps Up Post-Snowden, RIP Free Press

I posted the item above on Facebook early this morning. An environmental leader in my community tried to watch the video and he got the same message I did. According to Newsmax.com:

The decision to block American audiences from viewing their international news videos is apparently a concession on the part of the Persian Gulf-based television news network to get U.S. TV operators to carry them, Gigaom.com reported.

Here's the short text in full from the Al Jazeera English tar sands article:

Canada's oil sands boom is producing an unwanted by-product, huge piles of petroleum coke. Tens of millions of tonnes of the black powdery substance are accumulating in both Canada and the US. Al Jazeera's Daniel Lak reports from the US city of Detroit, where large clouds of coke from nearby Canada blew into homes last month.

This suppression of key health information for citizens reminds me of the virtual blackout of news from Fukushima these past two and half years. 

Dedicated nuclear disaster watchers have shared as much information as they could gather or glean, but only this month did corporate news outlets finally begin reporting on a situation that is already well into its meltdown phase, as in NBC reporting yesterday Radiation spikes to fatal levels at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant. Had information been freely available to us since the earthquake and tsunami, might TEPCO and the Japanese government have received the kind of urgent expert help they have needed to possibly contain the disastrous effects on human and other life on our planet? We'll never know.

When corporations own media outlets, put politicians in office and remove them, and ignore the will of the people, we get action that focuses on capitalism's bottom line rather than life's bottom line. From Al Jazeera's article today on the Prime Minister of Japan (finally) stepping in to head up the disaster response:

Public concern over Fukushima, revived by the news of leaks of radiated water at the plant, have threatened to further delay the restart of other off-line reactors - a crucial part of Abe's plan for economic revival and a pillar of the turnaround plan Tepco has given its creditor banks.

Note that "public concern" is the threat here, not the 1,800 millisieverts per hour of radiation TEPCO admits it detected, a level which will kill a human in four hours.

Photo making the rounds on the Internet. Looks like the US government may have a problem on their hands. Did I mention that the US Army admitted it was blocking The Guardian website from access by all enlisted personnel due to reporting of NSA surveillance news via Edward Snowden's leaks?

Meanwhile, keeping people well distracted: the imminent threat that the US will bomb Syria. Around 80% of the public currently opposes this military action -- for a variety of sound reasons. Demonstrations broke out all over the globe after corporate government spokesmen Obama and Kerry went on t.v. to rattle their sabres at Assad.

Compare if you will the reporting on Portland, Maine's protest and march organized by Veterans for Peace chapters and joined by about 50 participants.

The corporate news version was produced by a writer for the Portland Press Herald, which is owned by the hedge fund billionaire husband of Democrat Chellie Pingree, who represents Portland in Congress.

The second report was compiled from footage and interviews. I was pleased to see my CODEPINK associate Pat Taub speaking up for the grandchildren, and calling for "more feet on the street" to keep pressure on as Congress considers the matter. Also pleased to hear a handful of citizens pointing out that budget cuts at home are a direct result of out of control spending on the military.

Monument Square August 31, 2013 Portland Maine Syria protest / Regis Tremblay on Vimeo.

The same day I compared these two reports I noticed a Huff Po column by Norman Solomon warning that the propaganda ramp up to sell an attack on Syria will be beyond the scope of anything we've seen so far. I was not surprised since when I searched for "protest Syria" I found numerous corporate news accounts giving equal billing to Syrian-Americans calling for the US to bomb Assad regime strongholds, and repeating a lie against CODEPINK that we have been "disturbingly silent" about criticizing the Obama administration's ongoing air strikes in numerous countries. I have seen this lie -- which I believe is intended to herd us onto one side of the false dichotomy of Democrats vs. Republicans -- so many times in so many places that I sense it must spring from a common source.

Activists have used blogs, Twitter, Facebook, web sites, and email as tools to share information and plan resistance.

Source: US woman violently arrested at protest against US military action in Syria / Press TV

Facebook is how I learned of police state creeping in this report that veteran Emily Yates was arrested and roughed up in Philadelphia for playing her banjo in a spot on Independence Mall deemed unacceptable by park police. Last summer I experienced the arbitrary zones and restrictions imposed in this public space during the Occupy National Gathering. Good thing I did not have a banjo.

Also via Facebook, I learned of this Arizona checkpoint action recording threats, dogs, and the order to "shut up." If this brave citizen wasn't a white woman with a white male companion, a camera, and lots of family houses, how might this incident have ended?

Any day now I expect to open my blog and find that access has been denied. Information control is the order of the day.

#FUKUSHIMA MELTING DOWN ! Headline Goes MIssing

Source: http://www.subilgi.com/waternews.asp

I am married to a man who spent decades researching and speaking about the dangers of the nuclear power industry. Because he has a clear grasp of the scientific aspects of the grave threat hovering over life on this planet, he continues to be appalled at the silence and indifference of the corporate press and the U.S. public who depend upon it for their "news."

If the media outlets that command so much attention with celebrity birth news were reflecting reality right now, they would be running headlines like this:

      ------ EXTRA! EXTRA! ------
3 REACTOR CORES MELTING INTO PACIFIC OCEAN
Bequerels of radiation increasing exponentially
Strontium-90 among radioactive isotopes detected in groundwater mixed with sea water indicates core is in meltdown; mixing of fresh and salt water indicates pollutants are leaking into Pacific Ocean.

Instead, those who care must sift through highly technical reports like this one and connect their own dots between the scientific facts:  

950,000,000,000 Bq/m3 of Cs-134/137 was detected from reactor2 seawater trench shaft....They also measured 520,000,000,000 Bq/m3 of all β nuclides to include Strontium-90. The chloride concentration was 7,500 ppm.

Of course there are plenty of smart people who are paying attention; it's just that they have no way to break through the wall of silence imposed by media corporations owned by the same people who profit from building nuclear reactors -- and who lose big money if their criminal liability is exposed in disasters at nuclear power plants.

Carol Wolman, bless her heart, has been sending around a petition to U.S. senators serving West coast states, calling on them for an independent investigation that sidesteps TEPCO and its inability to contain Fukushima's meltdown. Wolman shared a really scary article published on July 24, "Rising Tritium Could Trigger Huge Fukushima Blasts" by Yoichi Shimatsu, a former editor of the Japan Times Weekly (a publication I used to write for). It read, in part:

Two serious threats are emerging during this tritium build-up: 

- medical effects of exposure to beta particles on top of gamma radiation from the Fukushima releases; 

- and more ominous, the possibility of a tritium-deuterium fusion reaction that triggers a plutonium blast more powerful than the 2011 explosion at Reactor 3. 

Apologists for the nuclear industry, including the Wall Street Journal, boldly assert beta radiation emitted by tritium poses no health threat. This irresponsible claim is based on a gross underestimate of the effects of beta rays. While less powerful than gamma radiation, beta radiation can ionize DNA. Externally beta rays can be blocked by a thin sheet of metal foil, but inside human tissues there are no physical barriers to prevent beta particles from rupturing chromosomes.

There are measures that could be taken to ward off the blast Shimatsu warns us of, but pretty much everyone agrees that TEPCO lacks both the will and the ability to spring into action.

My spirit grows weary of repeating the same formula to the pack of evil moronsknown as energy executives, nuclear engineers, government bureaucrats and politicians. But here we go again, preaching to the wicked. 

The underground corium pockets can be detected by radiation scanners and with blast tomography, which reveals the locations of larger concentrations. Next, steam-injection pumps used at near-exhausted oil fields should be deployed to pump borax solution into those pockets. Borax unlike boric acid, crystallizes in solution, thereby partitioning the underground spaces with neutron-absorbing barriers. Subdivided into smaller cysts, the fissile materials will be deprived of critical mass.

Evil morons would also have been an apt term for those scientists, politicians and bureaucrats who conspired to drop nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of the Pacifica phase of WWII. Why it wasn't necessary, and the lasting effects for all of us, have been amply documented elsewhere for those with ears to hear the truth.

Meanwhile, my friend Bruce Gagnon has just returned from Asia and Australia on a speaking tour and fact-finding mission about the so-called Pacific Pivot, planned by the Pentagon and announced through their mouthpiece Barack Obama. In his blog Organizing Notes Gagnon writes:

...it's clear that Obama's "pivot" is more than the Navy - the US Air Force also has big plans to expand this provocative and expensive encirclement of China. 

As we approach Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) days of remembrance it is vital to understand that any hopes for nuclear disarmament are being smashed to bits by the US military surrounding of Russia and China.  Russia and China have no incentive nor military justification to contemplate reducing their nukes at the same time the Pentagon's rope tightens around their necks. 

Nuclear disarmament activists should listen to Russia and China as they react to US moves.  They are being upfront about their reluctance to shrink their retaliatory capability.  Disarmament activists need to be talking much more about US "missile defense," naval, and Air Force moves into the Asia-Pacific.  All of these destabilizing deployments are killers to hopes for nuclear abolition.

Kind of like the destabilizing meltdown of Fukushima is a killer to hopes for the future of life on Earth.

Too discouraging? Try looking at pictures of bunnies for a few minutes. Then, get back to work sharing information.

From the excellent information website Fukushima Diary. It has a KAWAII (cute) tab with pictures to relieve stress.

"Under Threat From Public Scrutiny" U.S. Govt v. The People

CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin with associates in Portland, Oregon just before the release of her book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.

I was momentarily elated to read that the CIA was scaling back the use of drone attacks in Pakistan because the program was "under threat from public scrutiny," as reported here by ABC News. 

But I soon found that meant public scrutiny in Pakistan, not the U.S.

Despite the unceasing efforts of anti-drone activiss to share information on how many civilians -- including numerous children -- die in drone strikes, and how less than 2% of the deaths are actually targeted militants,

 Screenshot of amazing data display which you deserve to see unfold: Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

the U.S. public remains largely oblivious, concerning itself mostly with what to eat and celebrity gossip about the birth of famous babies.

Sunlight Foundation blogger John Wonderlich reported that, on the eve of Bradley Manning's sentencing, "Obama Promises Disappear from Web": 

Change.gov, the website created by the Obama transition team in 2008, has effectively disappeared sometime over the last month.

Speculating as to why this might have occurred, Sunlight re-published one of the many promises that had been disappeared:

Protect Whistleblowers... Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

Tell that to John Kiriakou, whistleblower on the CIA's use of torture. Here's his letter on being denied medical treatment in the federal prison where he's doing 2+ years of time for sharing information the Obama administration did not want shared. About torture conducted by an official of the Bush administration.

 (Image from twitter user@jeremyscahill)

Meanwhile, back in drone land, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye was finally freed after three years in prisons our own Justice Department describes as subjecting prisoners to torture and abuse -- and the White House expressed disappointment. That Abdulelah Haider had been freed.

Because Obama had specifically requested that he be kept in prison.

His crime? Jeremy Scahill speculated that it might be that the journalist had

conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list.

Al-Awlaki, as those of you paying attention are aware, is the most high profile US citizen to have been killed by extrajudicial drone strikes, in part because his 16 year old son, also a US citizen, was killed two weeks later in yet another drone strike in Yemen.

It isn't just war news that is suppressed. So is news about what is likely to eventually be seen as the biggest event of any of our lifetimes. Almost no one in the U.S. knows that Fukushima's reactor No. 3 appears to be in meltdown. Or that TEPCO seems unable to muster a meaningful response even though there is action they could take. Or that thyroid abnormalities in infants have increased 28% in Hawaii and the west coast of North America. 

You can sign a petition urging West coast senators to investigate the unfolding disaster as a step toward mustering an international response.

Did you know that Obama instructed the EPA to stop monitoring radiation levels in April, 2011? Or that the American Medical Association recently issued a call for testing all U.S. seafood for radiation and sharing the results with the public? Because, for instance,

On July 10, 2013, the Japan Times reported that rising radioactivity levels in seawater off the coast of Fukushima measured 90,000 times more than officially “safe” drinking water...Bluefin tuna caught off San Diego in an August 2012 study demonstrated elevated amounts of Cesium 134 and 137, which are considered characteristic isotopic markers for Fukushima radiation.

Well, maybe you did know that. But most of your neighbors remain in blissful ignorance.

Our government acts with impunity because it does not believe that what passes for public scrutiny in the U.S. is meaningful enough to pose a threat.

Not yet.

Truth Leaking Through All Over The Place

source: The Young Turks

Bombshell news of the week that the National "Security"Admistration (NSA) had successfully accessed all the calling and browsing records of all the customers of Verizon, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Skype,YouTube, PalTalk and Apple for years -- under a top secret program called PRISM the corporations deny any knowledge of -- surprised some citizens less than others.

If you woke up to realize that you lived under government of, by and for corporations would you really still think that civil liberties for mere people were intact?

I still use all of those corporate services to connect with others concerned about the state of our world, and to share information. It occurred to me years ago that the powers that be allowed me access to these nifty tools for networking and research because those same tools made it so convenient for their surveillance of me.

Since I have nothing to hide and I'm proud of being willing to dissent and to organize resistance, I go along with the plan -- until the day my corporate government shuts down the Internet, and disaffected citizens go to the streets and stay there. (Maybe I should start right now raising carrier pigeons?)

Some of the other truths worthy of notice that leaked into my view this week:

Anonymous responded by leaking a bunch of NSA documents "including seriously important stuff like the US Department of Defense's 'Strategic Vision' for controlling the internet" according to Chris Mills on Gizmodo.

The New York Times published a side by side comparison of the food warning labels and ingredient disclosures of staple comfort food Kraft mac & cheese. According to food watchdog website Food Babe, buyers in the UK see these warnings that buyers in the USA do not:

Warning #1: This Product May Cause Adverse Effects On Activity And Attention In Children (This warning label is required because The US version of Kraft Mac & Cheese has artificial food dyes yellow #5 and yellow #6 which are proven to be linked to hyperactivity in children.) 

Warning #2: GMO Declaration: Made from genetically modified wheat. (May contain GMO) (This warning label is required because the US version of Kraft Mac & Cheese contains GMOs.)

The Environmental "Protection" Agency (EPA) drastically reduced protections to be offered in case of radioactive release events. According to a Reader Supported News article on the EPA's Protective Action Guides (PAG):

The new PAGs eliminate requirements to evacuate people in the face of high projected thyroid, skin, or lifetime whole body doses; recommend dumping radioactive waste in municipal garbage dumps not designed for such waste; propose five options for drinking water, which would dramatically increase the permitted concentrations of radioactivity in drinking water, by as much as 27,000 times, compared to EPA's current Safe Drinking Water Act limits; and suggest markedly relaxing long-term cleanup standards. 

"In essence the government is now saying nuclear power accidents could produce such widespread contamination and produce such high radiation levels that the government should abandon efforts to clean it up and instead force people to live with radiation-induced cancer risks orders of magnitude higher than ever considered acceptable," said Daniel Hirsch, president of Committee to Bridge the Gap.

This news saddened but also failed to surprise me because of 1) the tepid response of the corporate controlled Japanese government in response to the continuously unfolding nuclear pollution disaster at Fukushima (of an earthquake damaged reactor built by mega corporation General Electric) and 2) the non-existent response of the corporate controlled U.S. government to the continuously unfolding nuclear pollution disaster in New Mexico on tribal territory of the Navajo nation. The uncontained effect of years of radioactive groundwater on the nation's -- and the planet's -- wheat supply was ably chronicled this week by Dr. Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese in "America's Secret Fukushima Poisoning the Breadbasket of the World."

Kevin and Margaret are two of the folks I will be training my carrier pigeons to stay in contact with when the Dept. of "Defense" or some other entity shuts down my online access. For now, their news website is on my often-read list: PopularResistance.org.

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Forgetting Fukushima

-->I had a dream in early summer, one I suspect I'll always remember. I was the passenger in a car with an old high school friend at the wheel, which might explain why he was humping my leg and I was pushing him away in the opening scene. Next the car began to roll forward carelessly, and I perceived that we were at the edge of a grand canyon vista of reddish layers of earth, eroded, beautiful and vast. I called out in alarm and my classmate applied the brake; he wasn't much concerned, he had it under control. Moments later we were rolling again and I repeated the alarm, now scrambling my foot over to the brake pedal, my hand upon the wheel as the car teetered on the edge, dipping forward in its dance with gravity, flooding my view with menacing, beckoning beauty. 

We surpassed the tipping point, and the car began to fall. At the same instant I gave up the struggle and heard my inner voice say, without regret, I had a good life. The car fell gently, and I checked out before impact. A final scene consisted of meeting with bewildered elders in a place nearby; they weren't there to assign blame, but they genuinely wanted to know how I could have let it happen.

In Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step Cecile Pineda has delivered a poetic, profound meditation on the slowly unfolding death of the natural world by man-made radiation. She's not the only one who sees it, but she's in a very small group of people currently alive on the planet who are able to face annihilation without blinking. Oprah will likely not be picking up her book, but I will be finding Pineda's novels (Face, The Love Queen of the Amazon, Frieze) to read as we coast downhill toward oblivion.

When I remember Hiroshima (the first place destroyed with nuclear weapons 67 years ago yesterday) and Nagasaki (the second place destroyed by a different type of nuclear weapon 67 years ago) I can't help but continue to remember Fukushima. Here I think in terms of a table or chart juxtaposing what my fellow citizens think they know about these far off places with names difficult to pronounce, and what I think I know about places I visit only in my mind.

 
-->

Place in Japan	What U.S. citizens “know”	What I “know”
Hiroshima 広島市	Bombing it saved untold numbers of U.S. lives by making a ground invasion of Japan unnecessary	Japan was already negotiating for surrender, and had long since lost the war; their economy was so crushed that they were building kamikaze planes without landing gear in order to save yen; President Truman said: we have spent so much money building these weapons, we have to use them.
Nagasaki 長崎市	The Japanese still didn't surrender after Hiroshima, so we had to show them we weren't kidding.

--> We were in too much of a rush to allow three days for Japan to react to Hiroshima with unconditional surrender; we were testing a completely different type of nuclear weapon; we were making an example of Japan so the Russians, the Chinese, and anybody else would think twice before challenging our power to destroy. Fukushima

福島市 The nuclear plant failure was caused by a tsunami, it contaminated a rural area right around the plant, and it's all under control now. --> Radiation alarms went off when the earthquake hit, hours before the tsunami; the Mark I Boiling Water Reactors at Fukushima have a design flaw that dooms them all to fail eventually due to containment vessels that grow brittle; General Electric made them and sold them to Japan following the Marshall Plan economic buildup of Japan as a de facto colony/aircraft carrier of the U.S.; TEPCO has successfully argued in court that it has no liability for the radiation released by Fukushima's venting; the radioactive plume continues to unfurl across the skies and in the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere; Reactor #4 is still in critical state and, if its fuel rods go, Earth could become uninhabitable by humans for 4.5 billion years or so; President Obama takes huge campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry, and continues to budget tax-funded expansion of both weapons and nuclear power production; the U.S. quietly stopped monitoring radiation levels on the West coast, and agreed not to ban any food from Japan, post-Fukishima; women and especially mothers and grandmothers in Japan hold daily protests against the use of nuclear power which are almost never reported in the mainstream press in the U.S.

The Guardian July 30, 2012 ran this photo with the caption Protesters hold placards and shout slogans as they march to form a 'human chain' around Japan's parliament in Tokyo, to demonstrate against nuclear power plants. Photograph: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images

Pineda uses Fukushima as a jumping off point to make a convincing case that production of nuclear fuel for whatever purpose is effectively conducting war on the living inhabitants of the world. She acknowledges that a culture built on attending to the shiny surface of things is designed to overlook: The hundreds of thousands of nameless Russians who died burying Chernobyl. The fact that your government makes weapons out of depleted uranium, weapons that have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other places, creating soil and dust that produces human fetuses so deformed they are not recognizably human. The fact the U.S. is full of G.E.-built Mark I Boiling Water Reactors, many sitting on top of seismic faults, others sitting right on the shoreline of the Pacific or Atlantic region of Earth's one ocean. 

The fact that, if you're my age, you can probably no longer count the people you've known who survived, or did not survive, cancer. Cause and effect break down when cause is an invisible, tasteless, odorless substance that takes longer to break down than does the human body.

Pineda suggests reading Greg Palast's Vulture's Picnic for a more detailed examination of the central nuclear industry truth, "it turned out that fixing the regulators was cheaper than fixing the problem." In case you want to know why your government uses your own money to kill you for the profits of a few. Pineda herself is more interested in examining the details of who stops cooperating in the death-for-profit game. She quotes a farmer who helped bring a lawsuit to block yet another Japanese nuclear plant from starting up, Hatsumi Ishimaru: "Women are at the head of the anti-nuclear campaign because we value life more than economic gain."

Official pronouncements coached by top dollar public relations firms can steer public perception, but they cannot change facts on the ground. Pineda writes:

...it's conceivable that in the larger scheme, Mother Earth may be the "decider" notwithstanding her failure to be recognized by the government -- or any other government for that matter -- with the exception of the government of Bolivia.

If she has any hope left, it's riding on the rise of the global 99%. She quotes Takanobu Kobayashi, an activist who leads Japanese citizens in the relentless pursuit of life over death: "We do not trust the government anymore."

CODEPINK Observes the 4th of July in Japan: No More Fukushimas!

Reposted from CODEPINK Local Actions page, a 4th of July report from Japan's coordinator Hisae Ogawa in the city of Osaka:

This weekend I visited the college I graduated from. It is close to US Air Force Base YOKOTA. The base is still there interfering with the peaceful life of the people.

Today, July 4th, I joined the 'Peace March heading to Hiroshima'. We walked through downtown Osaka. The mayor sent us a message of support but the governor of Osaka prefecture did not support our efforts.

We cried out 'No more Hiroshimas', 'No more Nagasakis', 'No more Fukushimas', 'No more nukes', 'No more nuclear power plants.'

More actions will follow in August.

Walk for Fukushima & Nuclear Truth

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
contact Mie at 207-691-3508 
mkathearn@mail.goo.ne.jp.

Walk for Fukushima

Mie Athearn, a Japanese woman living in Maine and a native of Fukushima Prefecture, is undertaking a "Walk for Fukushima" to deliver a message to the Japanese government appealing for stronger actions to protect children from radiation hazards in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.
Ms. Athearn, acutely aware of the heightened stresses being experienced by her close family members over the ongoing releases of radioactive contamination from the crippled reactors, and distressed by the Japanese government response seemingly dictated by expediency and downplaying, has decided to walk from Rockland to the Japanese Consulate in Boston to seek an audience with officials there urging a stronger public health response to the crisis.

She was also inspired by the Peace Walkers who came through Rockland last year, led by Japanese Buddhist monks and nuns. Just back from their latest pilgrimage from Boston to Albany, with stops at nuclear power plants in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, the Grafton Peace Pagoda is now lending its support to the Walk for Fukushima.

With her husband Steven, Jun Yasuda of the Peace Pagoda, and various others, Mie set out from Rockland on Sunday, September 4 and expects to arrive in Boston on September 19, covering a distance of nearly 200 miles. The walk will partly coincide with a series of anti-nuclear actions within Japan planned for the week of September 11, and culminating with a "goodbye nukes" rally in Tokyo on September 19. Those dates are, respectively, six months since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, and five months since a Ministry of the national government, MEXT, directed Fukushima Prefecture to adopt a much laxer standard for radiation exposure, making higher-than-controlled-workplace doses for children officially acceptable.
They also plan to make a stop at the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire.

People wanting to lend a hand by offering overnight accomodations, daytime rest stops, organizing events along the way, or joining some portion of the walk themselves may contact Mie at 207-691-3508 or mkathearn@mail.goo.ne.jp.  A schedule of stopping points for the walk is given below.

Schedule, "Walk for Fukushima"

9/4 Rockland – Warren
9/5 Warren – Nobleboro
9/6 Nobleboro – Edgecomb (Reception/meeting at Shadis Law Office, Newcastle, 7 pm)
9/7 Edgecomb -- Bath (Excursion to view spent fuel canisters at former Maine Yankee site, Wiscasset)
9/8 Bath – Brunswick
9/9 Brunswick – Yarmouth
9/10 Yarmouth – Portland
9/11 4-5 miles in Portland ("Freedom trail" walk leaving from Meg Perry Center, Congress St at 2 pm, then participation in evening 9/11 program at Back Cove)
9/12 Portland – Saco (Reception by mayor of Biddeford, 3 pm; Potluck reception at First Parish UCC, Saco, 6 pm)
9/13 Saco – Wells
9/14 Wells – York
9/15 York – Portsmouth (After arrival in Portsmouth, transport to NRC public comment session, Hamption, 1:30 to 4:30 pm)
9/16 Portsmouth – Seabrook (Afternoon vigil at Seabrook Station; Evening reception Newburyport)
9/17 Seabrook – Rowley
9/18 Rowley – Saugus
9/19 Saugus -- Boston (Meet Leventhal Park 12 pm then walk to Japan Consul General)

Here are ources of information that Steve Ahearn wanted to share with us:

Professor Kodama's historic angry speech to the parliamentary subcommittee on July 27:

http://fukushimanewsresearch.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/indie-part-2-professor-tatsuhiko-kodama-of-tokyo-university-tells-the-politicians-what-are-you-doing/

http://fukushimanewsresearch.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/indie-radiation-effects-on-health-protect-the-children-of-fukushima/  (A seemingly good written translation of his talk, with graphics)


Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen's regular Fukushima updates are an excellent way to follow developments: http://www.fairewinds.com/updates

Radioactive fallout, Japan:
"NHK Special: Mapping the radioactive fallout"
http://fukushimanewsresearch.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/indie-nhk-special-mapping-the-radioactive-fallout-video/ (Excellent NHK documentary with English narration - 1.5 hrs)

Radioactive fallout, North America, August 2011:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPxCLJQ5tj (Oklahoma City, first rain after drought 8/6/11)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDSpCxjZ2D8 (Toronto, Canada 8/14/11)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJCRmaIDCQE (St Louis 8/20/11)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEsKxmJPUmM (positive identification of 8/20 fallout - long discussion)

Petitions, Japan:
http://sayonara-nukes.org/shomei/ Sayonara nukes petition.

A few informative articles:
"34 spots top Chernobyl evacuation standard" (Yomiuri Shinbun)
http://fukushima.greenaction-japan.org/2011/09/01/34-spots-top-chernobyl-evacuation-standard/

"Wanted: The right to relocate: Growing radiation exposure and the July 19 citizen government talks in Fukushima":
http://fukushima.greenaction-japan.org/2011/08/03/wanted-the-right-to-relocate-%E2%80%94-growing-radiation-exposure-and-the-july-19-citizen-government-talks-in-fukushima/

"Japanese NGOs urge UN to investigate violation of children's human rights in Fukushima"
http://fukushima.greenaction-japan.org/2011/08/17/japanese-ngos-urge-un-to-investigate-violation-of-children%E2%80%99s-human-rights-in-fukushima/

Lights Around Portland on 9/11

Second stop of the Care-a-Van to Bring Our War $$ Home: Portland, Maine where organizer Grace Braley held an event on the evening of 9/11 ranging people around the bay with points of light. As we arrived, so did the Fukushima peace walkers on their way to Boston. So first we greeted people from the country that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on. Then Mansour and Jane arrived; Mansour is from Libya, where NATO and the U.S. dropped bombs made with depleted uranium.

All of us spread out along the edge of the bay waiting for 7:45pm when we would turn on our love lights for fifteen minutes. Here Mark stands with Michael Cutting, one of those who was around the kitchen table in Sally Breen's house when the BOW$H slogan originated.

We saw Markos Miller, our favorite candidate for mayor of Portland, plus a lot of other peaceniks as we hiked the mile to our designated spot near Interstate-295. Along the way my sister in PINK Pat Taub explained why she was joining in on behalf of her young grandchildren.

A highway worker ignored Mark climbing on the sign post next to southbound I-295, but at least one passing motorist honked in greeting.

As twilight gave way to night we could see points of light along the shore stretching in both directions. A bicyclist passed us holding his light aloft. Back at the parking area we saw our friend El-Fadel Arbab, who was a lost boy of Sudan that found his calling traveling around speaking to young people about raising their voices against genocide. He will be at UMaine Presque Isle this week speaking to about 1,000 young people in total.

We're all in this together, people. Either we bring the light, or the forces of darkness will close over all of us.

Save Fukushima's Children, Born and Unborn

Photo links to Bruce Gagnon's blog about joining the walk. Link to petition on Facebook.

Mie Kuboda Athearn, who is from Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, gave a talk in Bath, Maine on the evening of September 7. Mie and her husband Steve are walking 200 miles from their home in Rockland to Boston where they'll deliver a petition calling on the government of Japan to save the born and unborn children of Fukushima. It has been nearly six months since the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was struck by the twin forces of earthquake and tsunami, producing the third disaster of a meltdown that appears to continue today.

Mie's tale was one of government indifference and cover-up, of radioactive hot spots at the bottom of school playground slides where rain runoff accumulates, and of teachers who resign rather than follow official orders to withhold the truth from students and their families.

According to Mie, who returned to Fukishima in April to spend three months with her family, people living in the area are frightened but they don't know what to do. The government has said they should “self-evacuate” but has offered no material support to do so. The prospect of leaving behind farms, mortgages, employment, and health care for an uncertain future has paralyzed many into inaction. People in other parts of the country are fearful of receiving the nuclear refugees in case they, too, become contaminated, mirroring the discrimination experienced by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. She described the feeling of people there as depressed.

Mie's 17 year old nephew continued to play outdoors with his soccer club even as contaminated rain fell, because no official word warned against it. His mother, Mie's sister, was unable to convince her son of the danger of being out in the rain. Another family decided to send their children away to school in the U.S. – but the Japanese government would not give them permission to leave.

Mie believes that under Japan's Constitution the government is obliged to provide transportation, housing, and income replacement for those who are exposed to the risk. Article 25 says: “the State shall use its endeavors for the promotion and extension of social welfare and security, and of public health.” The petition she is carrying to the Prime Minister demanding that the government prioritize the testing and evacuation of pregnant women, infants, and children from the affected area.

Ironically, there is ample evidence of radioactive contamination reaching far beyond Fukushima Prefecture. Like to Washington state, Oklahoma City, qand Toronto.

If you're like me, you may be wondering why you don't know more about this global disaster as it unfolds. It may be because you view news media, like government, as existing for the benefit of the people, rather than profitable entities like TEPCO, owner of Dai-ichi power plant, or General Electric, which built most of the nuclear reactors in Japan. GE got a $3.3 billion refund on their federal taxes (i.e. paid nothing in taxes), and spent $41.8 million on lobbying and campaign contributions.  Jeff Immelt, its CEO, received compensation for the year to $15.2 million.

Information control was the most interesting part of the story. Mie said, “When I was in Japan they tried to be neutral in the news...They just showed on the tv 'The measurement at the city hall today is ___.' So we just watched that number. And also, 'Today we got our news from this area, we found iodine in this food.' Very netural news. They didn't express a strong opinion toward the government or TEPCO. But I was taking my parents' local newspaper in Fukusima, too. People there know it's a very serious problem so the writers were standing on our side; they tried to speak truth, tried to let other people know how the Fukushima people were hurting.”

Jun-san, a Japanese Buddhist nun who is walking the 200 miles to the consulate in Boston with Mie and Steve, added: “After the explosion many conservative magazines and almost all news outlets said no more nuclear power. My friend is a professor in a university in Tokyo, and she said (the news) now starts changing to a different direction again. The Asahi Shinbun (a big daily newspaper) said, 'Sorry we have been supporting nuclear power plants, not showing the truth...but that is not right.' So, begging to the readers they said, 'We have been reporting in a mistaken way, not truth.' They say sorry. They start writing that we need all 55 nuclear power plants closed.”

(Japan) closed 34 power plants, and there's a campaign to control energy use. My mother during a very hot summer said she kept her air conditioning turned off.”

But maybe three weeks ago I talked to a woman professor. (Now the papers are saying) 'We can't close nuclear power plants so quickly, maybe by 2050.' So now they are changing, shifting again. So it's very important that other countries like America show (they are) closing and building no more nuclear power plants.”

Mie: “Japan's media is very funny (she makes a hand gesture of flip flopping). I was surprised by so many conservative magazines writing about nuclear power plants in a truthful way. I was excited that Japan was changing.”

Mary Beth Sullivan, who has been working to end the nuclear threat to life for decades, observed: “But now everyone knows the truth, and you can't put that truth back in the box.”

Jun-san: “My mother and sister know it's very dangerous, but they don't know what to do. That's why most everyone now is in depresssion. And the government knows depression time is a good time for switching (their story).”

Info Insurgency Now!

Maine BOW$H campaign next meeting: Sat July 16 following the Old Hallowell Days parade.

We had a rocking good meeting in Maine yesterday to plan the Bring Our War $$ Home Care-a-Van starting on 9/11. We hope to buy or borrow an actual van that will transport people from one event to another for thirty days, with two goals in mind.

First goal: support our representatives in Congress to continue voting no on war funding, and speaking out about the need to end the wars right now. The second: raise consciousness about the connection between war spending and budget cuts at home, and how individuals are being affected. “Most people don't know how much of the federal budget goes to the military,” someone said, waving around a visual that pegged it at 56%.

Both our reps in the House seem to know, and have been consistent no votes on the war supplemental bills, and even voting against the big Defense Authorization annual funding bill recently. Both of them expressed disappointment at President Obama's tepid speech promising to take a year and a half to withdraw most of the troops he surged into Afghanistan. Last year we heard Chellie Pingree tell her boyfriend at the Common Ground Fair about the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign, “These people are everywhere.”

We plan to keep it up, so the Care-a-Van will visit the Fair, which falls each year on the weekend nearest the autumnal equinox. It's a big destination for tourists, old hippies, granolas (their children), crunchy granolas (their grandchildren), and just generally lots of people who enjoy growing or eating organic local foods.

Some of you might think that bringing the BOW$H campaign presence to the Common Ground Fair is preaching to the choir. But some of you would be wrong.

After our three hour session generating ideas and kicking around dates, van ideas (“Could it run on vegetable oil?) and event ideas (free medical clinics, supporting indigenous people's land use initiatives, reaching out to returning vets who are coming home to no jobs and no, well, homes) some of us stayed for a wildly inspired movie about people using their creative abilities to fuel activism. Cultures of Resistance was so amazing that three people immediately asked to screen it in their local communities. About fifty of us also saw a short film on the Gaza Freedom March, and I gave a report from Ridgely Fuller, a passenger on the current flotilla that has been stuck in Greece waiting to sail. (Looks like it is about to come unstuck -- short interview with Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK and a glimpse of Ridgely in Athens' Syntagma Square on Democracy Now! coverage of the flotilla).

We left feeling energized and ready for the steps to take our campaign beyond last week's mayors' resolution win.

We had dinner with friends that evening, following a memorial service for a beloved neighbor who passed away during the winter. A small group of people who have known each other for decades, and watched each other's children grow up. Most work as educators in some kind of way, or in media. All are affluent white folks who have had the opportunity of a college education.

There was talk of technology, of travel past and future, and the fact that I was headed to California the next day prompted Mark to mention that hot particles are turning up in automotive air filters in Washington State. Our friends were alarmed at this news. What? Why? What's going on in Washington?

I assume it's from Fukushima, Mark said.

What's Fukishima? one of them said.

It's the nuclear power plant that melted down – is still melting down – in Japan, we said.

Oh. Ok, they had heard of that disaster. But isn't it over by now?

No, it's still burning through the floor of the container vessels, said Mark. And plutonium is never over, at least not in a human lifetime.

But how do you know about this? I haven't read anything about this – have you? Everybody shook their heads. No, nothing. Not on NPR. Not in the New York Times. Why not? they wondered.

Corporations control the media, I said. GE owns one of the big networks, said Mark. NBC, someone said. And someone else asked, Why does that matter?

GE built the reactors that are melting down, I said. They may have a lot of liability there. I also read that Australia stopped official monitoring of radiation in seafood this week, I added, like the U.S. stopped doing on the West coast months ago.

You two know too much, one of our friends said fondly, as if we were wayward children who would insist on opening Pandora's box.

Before I got on the plane this morning we had breakfast with a young member of the family who's been thinking a lot about peak oil and the future of energy for his generation. The bottom line: all the wars in the world won't avert the crash of our unsustainable lifestyle.

He shared a recent “aha” moment about propaganda and the so-called information age's dearth of, well, information.

Almost all music videos that get played are only about three things, according to his analysis: selling drugs to make a lot of money, spending money on “a bunch of crap that really has no value,” and commiting acts of senseless violence. “All things that will lead to getting locked up in prison,” he said. He was a bit amazed at this apparent master plan, as if the curtain had slipped for a moment, affording him a glimpse of The Man spinning out the illusion. Later our conversation veered into the national epidemic of obesity and diabetes, and the effects of advertising on eating habits. He had become aware of his own response to ads for products to consume, noting the craving that seemed to bubble up spontaneously after viewing.

Everyone thinks they're immune to propaganda, he said, but they're not.

Does an education offer any protection from propaganda? we wondered.

As for myself, I used to think so. But I really don't think so anymore.