OBAMA-WATCH.COM
44th EDITION: December 19th 2011
Jim Houle Editor

Oh how easily we are all deceived:
Iraqi Smoking Guns and Mushroom Clouds; The Libyan rebels are all Freedom Fighters;
The Lands of Judea and Samaria (commonly called Palestine) belong to the Jewish people forever;
Iran is well advanced in building a nuclear bomb to wipe out Israel;
Good King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia sends a thousand tanks across the causeway to help little Bahraini King Hamid al Khalifa suppress democracy on a small island where the 70% Shi'ites are ruled by Sunnis royals who control most of the wealth; (Hillary Clinton wrings her hand noiselessly but makes no protest).
Pfc. Bradley Manning goes on trial for releasing confidential (not Top Secret) State Department cables that the government initially dismissed as well-known and not news.

Something is Rotten in Libya: Forty-eight hours after Hillary Clinton lands in Tripoli and calls for “Gadhafi to be captured or killed as soon as possible”, he is captured and brutally assassinated by the TNC. (Ruppee News 11-13-11). TNC is the Transitional National Council we stacked with ex-CIA operatives, a few al-Qaeda types, MI 5s from Whitehall, and assorted bag men. NATO was authorized by the UN (Resolution 1973, 3-17-11) to impose a “No Fly Zone” so as to protect civilians being threatened by Gadhafi in Benghazi and to immobilize Gadhafi's air defenses. The US and its allies subsequently hit 5900 targets in 9700 sorties and left much of the country in ruins.(NYTimes survey 12-18-11). NATO and the UN admit scores of unarmed casualties but won't come up with a death toll. This demolition derby took a mere 240 days. By comparison, Qadhafi had worked for 40 years to increase oil revenues to far more of the people than in most other countries. Individual income rose from $34 per year to $34,000 to day and the people have the best medical care and lowest infant mortality rates in all of Africa. The UN Human Rights Council commended Libya in its 2010 report for its remarkable progress. When confronted with grisly videos of Myomar Gadhafi's death, our own Hillary Rodham Clinton giggled “We came, we saw, he died.”(Christian Amanpour, ABC and Franklin Lamb of RT). The TNC 'democratic rebels' as we like to call them, after having assured Gadhafi's convoy of safe passage, then called in NATO bombers and then captured, tortured and brutally murdered him. The UN Human Rights Commission, the Russian Foreign Minister, Human Rights Watch and many others called for an investigation of this gross violation of the Geneva Convention concerning the rights of POWs. Hillary supported the investigation and showed not a trace of shame.

Smelly Suppression In Egypt: Hilary has just delivered our yearly $2.0 billion bribe to the Egyptian military junta to make sure they thoroughly suppress the democracy movement in Tahrir Square and do not allow a vote on a new Constitution for at least six months. This weekend, the Junta denied using force against protesters despite the many frightening videos including one showing a woman with her hajib pulled off and police clubbing her half-clothed body. There is no image in Arab society that could be more damning than this one. Better the police merely plead that their limited budget does not provide high speed internet service. Instead their media adviser, a retired general named Abdel Kato, accused the protesters of being “delinquents who deserve to be thrown in Hitler's ovens”. I begin to believe that it was Mubarak that actually kept the lid on these fascist lunatics.

Putrefaction in Yemen, Pakistan and Iraq: Obama made a drone Predator attack in Yemen with Hellfire missiles on New Mexico-born US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16 year old son (born in Denver). The grandfather of the family, a Fullbright scholar, protested this violation of the 5th and 6th Amendments to our US Constitution. Earlier President Obama announced to a nation-wide audience on TV (5-1-10) that US Navy Seals had killed an unarmed Osamah Bin Ladin in a “firefight”in Pakistan. (Note that the FBI has never brought charges against bin Ladin for 9/11 because of a lack of evidence). The tradition of violating human rights was well demonstrated by former President Bush back in 2006 when he arranged a kangaroo court in Baghdad to hang Rumsfeld's good buddy Saddam Hussein, without the benefit of a real defense in court nor the ability to bring forth evidence, witnesses, or any of our other revered Constitutional safeguards.

Something is Very Rotten in Washington: President Obama has reneged on his promise just last week to veto the Military Appropriations Bill. A rider attached to this big money bill allows American citizens to be arrested on suspicion of involvement in terrorism (undefined) in the United States or abroad, denied civil trials, and held in military brigs indefinitely without charges. There goes the 5th and 6th Amendments to the Bill of Rights once again! The so-called Homeland Battlefield provisions in the newly passed $662-billion defense authorization bill generated a surprisingly wide range of legal interpretations. There was a brief moment when civil libertarians were stunned to see President Barack Obama actually take a stand in favor of civil liberties after several years of rolling back the basic rights of citizens. Obama said that he would veto the defense bill if it contained a provision for the indefinite detention of American citizens by the Army: “The military does not patrol our streets” he lectured. While many predicted it, Obama has once again betrayed the civil liberties community and lifted the threat of the veto. Americans will now be subject to indefinite military detention and denied trial in federal courts. (Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley RSN (12-15-11).

The White House is now saying that changes to the law made it unnecessary to veto the legislation. With that ridiculous explanation, the administration went into full spin control, using language designed to obscure the authority just handed to the military. “I am not sure which is worse: the loss of core civil liberties or the almost mocking post hoc rationalization for abandoning principle” says Jonathon Turley. The Pentagon brass, the CIA, the State Department and 4 retired generals all opposed this as “strip-mining of your freedom to resist tyranny”. (R.Nader, 1-14-11). Once the Senate approved it 93 to 7 and the House to 286 to 136, Obama, our latest 'profile in courage' caved, explaining that he had found a loophole that allowed him not to enforce this unconstitutional incarceration except when he really had it in for someone. (Oh the wonders of a Harvard education!)

Something is Really Rotten in Damascus: We watch the turmoil in Syria, unable to sort the white hats from the black. France suggests another NATO no-fly zone, pleased as they were with the wide-spread demolition this tactic produced in Libya. A media build-up is underway to explain to us how that Evil Bashir Assad, previously a innocuous opthamologist in London, is employing snipers to kill civilians on the streets. “What's taking place is an attempt by the Arab League to accommodate the US and NATO against one of the few states in the Arab world that still says “no” to US influence.” (Professor Franklin Lamb: RT 12-2-11) The Arab League is dominated by rich US client states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar, Oman and even poor Egypt. The UN High Commission for Human Rights, another willing US handmaiden these days, has put the death toll in Syria at 5,000 and recommended International Criminal Court action (the US is not a member). The Ambassador of the Universal Peace Foundation has called for a dialogue but “it seems that the West has taken the position that there can be no dialogue with the Evil Eye Doctor. The West is seeking a new regime in Syria as a tool to implement its own strategic interests in the region”. (RT.Com. 12-12-11) Arabic-speaking US soldiers, assured they were returning home from Iraq, have been transferred in dead of night to the Jordanian/Syrian border. (Sibel Edmond's Boiling Frog Post: 12-13-11). Turkish troops are also alleged to be gearing up for an assault across the Syrian border. Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reports that materiel from Gadhafi's abandoned arsenals and unmarked NATO aircraft are being ferried into Iskenderun, Turkey. The American Conservative reports that the CIA even refused to 'sign off' on the UN report of 3500 to 5000 killed in Syria because it is uncorroborated. They also discount mass defections from the Army, widely reported in the US, as a fabrication with few defections confirmed independently. We have found in the past that in circumstances like this, with almost no journalists allowed on the ground, rumors are easily constructed and quickly spread because visits to hospitals and morgues are blocked and access to soldiers and civilian observers refused. “Syrian government claims that it is being assaulted by rebels armed, trained and financed by foreign governments are more true than false” says Giraldi.

Something is Rotten in Denmark: So why do I quote Shakespear's Hamlet about the rottenness in Denmark? Upon Hamlet's return from university in England, he found his father poisoned, his mother quickly married off to the poisoner, Hamlet's uncle, and two of his best college friends bribed to arrange for Hamlet's death once he returns to university. His abuse of his love Ophelia has driven her to suicide. He has confronted evil and rottenness within his royal family and within himself. He finds no way to right all these wrongs, nor to escape the horror and the weakness that he sees most clearly within himself. He goes mad. Perhaps this will be our exit strategy as well. President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, who died this week in Prague said: “Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.”

”The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”

OBAMA-WATCH.COM
43rd EDITION
September 7, 2011
Jim Houle, Editor

Our nation-wide shock on September 11th, 2001 at seeing those two airliners penetrate the World Trade Center towers generated a sense of fear and vulnerability deep within our psyches. Seizing upon this, our national leaders convinced us that we must attack Afghanistan and Iraq, where those Al Qaeda terrorists allegedly came from. The majority of Americans still feel vulnerable to terrorist attack and have accepted that we must live in a era of endless war without any coherent rationale. Ten years later, these unending Pentagon battles abroad have become, in the words of the Washington Post's Sept. 5th editorial, our only growth industry. In a declining job market, they represent one of our very few successful jobs programs, employing everyone from GIs to weapons assemblers, from drone makers to private “security” firms protecting our occupiers abroad and taking on tasks our soldiers cannot do. No politician, including Barack Obama, will seriously challenge our huge military-industrial complex, nor question the Pentagon's brilliant propaganda machine that manufactures those new “enemies” we continually must find to justify our ever expanding war program with its enormous profits. Imagine how the Los Angeles Basin would collapse overnight into Depression should the war machine stop ordering new weapons from Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Fear-Based Economics
Now, ten years after September 11th 2001, when 2606 innocent office workers were deliberately murdered, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth believes it is time to seriously examine how these people actually died and if their deaths were really necessary. Why now do the A&E 9/11 Truth people bring this up, after much of the evidence of that day's disaster has been destroyed or well hidden, and when Americans are fully burdened by their need for economic survival? It seems to many that the very shaky story of the 9/11 attack by foreign terrorists upon our Homeland was too quickly accepted by a public driven by fear and is still used as the rationale for our abject surrender to the war machine that drives our entire economy. We have since learned that none of the 19 alleged hijackers were Iraqis or Afghanis, but we invaded those countries anyway. The 19 alleged hijackers actually included 15 Saudi Arabian citizens, 2 from the Emirates, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon.

Keeping Fear Alive
During the past decade, A&E 9/11Truth, an organization of over 1500 Professional Architects and Engineers from all over the United States associated with 12,400 other supporters, have signed The 9/11 Truth Petition calling for a new and independent investigation of one key element of the 9/11 mythology. These engineers and architects, of whom I am one, do not believe that the two 110 story towers and the nearby 44 story WTC-7 building could have each fallen in less than 12 seconds, essentially in free fall merely as a result of the fires ignited by the crash of two airliners and the burn off of their jet-fuel. We find it very disturbing that official investigations have failed to address the extensive evidence of planted explosive devices and incendiaries that likely contributed to the fall of these buildings. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency that so thoroughly botched up New Orleans flood relief, supervised the wholesale destruction of 9/11 evidence prior to the official investigation and contrary to the recommendations of the National Fire Protection Association. FEMA quickly loaded 200,000 tons of structural steel on barges and shipped it off to India and China for recycling. Only a few hundred pieces are now available as forensic evidence showing the high temperature incineration of steel girders that could never have been ignited by the jet fuel on the planes. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) deliberately excluded many relevant facts from their report, such as the presence of chemical residues, particles of un-ignited incendiaries, nanothermite, and molten metal in the wreckage in their rush to close the books on this disaster.

An Investigation Designed To Fail
The 9/11 Commission was unable to explain away the collapse of neighboring WTC-7 eight hours later and therefore conveniently ignored it in their final report. The Bush 9/11 Commission was headed by Governor Thomas Kean of New Jersey and Congressman Lee Hamilton, who after allowing publication of the final Commission Report, wrote their own book trying to disassociate themselves from the official findings. They called it “an investigation designed to fail”. However, many Americans still believe that on 9/11 19 Al Qaeda terrorists were able, without outside help, to reduce the World Trade Center to a pile of smoldering debris in seconds and this mythical story continues to justify our unending wars in the Middle East.

We at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have limited our investigations to as examination of evidence concerning the unexplained free-fall of these three Manhattan skyscrapers in seconds. We have not indulged in speculation about who actually planned and executed the 9/11 attacks in New York, nor have we studied the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon that same day. The Pentagon and our intelligence agencies have refused to release the 80 sets of film they seized of the United Flight 93 crash nor allowed eye witnesses to be interviewed. Until they do, independent investigation of the Pentagon crash cannot get very far and the truth will remain hidden. Some learned analysts point to lack of any new attacks upon our Homeland as proof that our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been successful.

We believe that there is now sufficient evidence to conclude that World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7 were destroyed not by jet impacts and the burning off of jet fuel but by controlled demolition with explosives. We therefore call upon Congress to initiate a new investigation with full subpoena powers. We feel that America can no longer be held hostage by the government's absurd stories as justification for our continuing open-ended wars in the Middle East. Our work is dedicated to the victims and to the families of those who died on September 11th 2001 and to all throughout the world who have been affected, including the hundreds of New Yorkers still dying of cancer as a result of breathing the smoke and dust generated that day. If you are interested in learning more, in signing our petition, and perhaps joining in this effort, you will find additional materials including DVDs available at: www.911Truth.org.

42nd Edition
August 6, 2011

Jim Houle - Editor

“The $2.5 trillion deficit-reduction deal brokered by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner, and President Barack Obama is grotesquely unfair. It's also bad economic policy. In the midst of a terrible recession, it will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. At a time when the wealthiest people in this country are doing extremely well, and when their effective tax rate is the lowest in decades, the rich are not required to contribute one penny more for deficit reduction. When corporate profits are soaring and many giant corporations avoid federal income taxes because of obscene loopholes in the tax code, corporate America will not be asked to contribute one penny more for deficit reduction. On the other hand, working families, children, the sick and the elderly - many of whom are already suffering because of the recession - will shoulder the entire burden:” Senator Bernie Saunders of Vermont (Aug.5, 2011).

Selling the American People a Totally Deceptive Message
The forces of the right have managed to guide the American people into a sense of helplessness, lethargy and stupid complacency. We have been told that: (1) the rising national deficit is our most serious problem today; (2) taxes are sapping the initiative of our business community; (3) we have to cut domestic spending because increasing the taxes on the wealthy individuals just gives the government more money to spend; (4) we cannot afford to cut defense spending, for this would only lower our guard against those terrorists who would invade our shores and steal our freedom; (5) entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are out of control and increasing our national debt; and (6) that if we were to plug tax loopholes on those businesses that contribute so much to our economic leadership in the world, we will inhibit them from expansion and from the creation of new jobs. Yet Noam Chomsky (Survey of International Policy Attitudes,Truthout, 5 August, 2011) insists that corporate power's ascendency over politics, society and both major political parties has moved corporations far to the right of the population which actually overwhelmingly favor taxing the rich, cutting defense spending, promoting education and protecting Social Security.

Slipping From Recession to Depression
Consumer spending is dropping relentlessly because people have less in their pocket and are afraid of the future. The Administration touted the 117,000 new jobs added in July, but carefully avoided mentioning that 175,000 new entry-level workers had hit the streets that same month looking for work. The total number of the unemployed actually rose. True unemployment hovers at 20% with no sign of recovery shown in the past 36 months, (No half-intelligent economist pays any attention to the thoroughly monkeyed numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing 9.1 %). Even the Wall Street Journal (8/8/11) does not expect any improvement in the jobs picture this year. Annual economic growth in the nation has slipped down to 1.3%, well below the Administration's forecast of 1.8% rise this year. Home ownership is at its lowest level since 1965 (CNN Money 8/8/11). We are well into the second dip of what could well be a real depression or a least very prolonged recession. Yet the debate is all about cutting spending.

So, What Did Roosevelt Do?
Franklin Delano Roosevelt demonstrated near the end of the Great Depression what Keynesian Economy Theory had explained and Republicans and Democrats have since employed whenever they thought about it at all: If economic stagnation is the problem, then put money out there to create public projects, create jobs, rebuild our crumbling bridges and roads, and watch the economy rebuild and expand. The vast majority of practicing economists today support this strategy, yet we are experiencing “the most drastic curtailment of public spending* in American history” (Chossudovsky, Global Research, 4 August, 2011). (*Please note that “public spending” as used here does not include defense spending nor corporate welfare (TARP) to the very large banks, where we have never before spent so much public money, even during WW II, and with so little measurable gain).

The conservative Tea Party cabal does not want to consider economic theory, it just complicates their simple, righteous rant that runs: “you can't spend what you do not have, the federal budget is no different than our family accounts.” Nor do they want to understand the truth that Social Security funds actually belong to the workers who paid in a portion of their paycheck and cannot be stolen away by Congress or Obama now. They do not comprehend that Social Security is not a part of the national debt. Oh my, that really confounds them.

Obama – What Have You Done To Your Voters?
Obama told us in his first State of the Union message (Jan. 2009) that a 2nd New Deal was in the wind: he promised us a program to rebuild our economy through spending on education, health, housing, renewable energy, and infrastructure programs. Then 2 1/2 years later on the night of August 2nd , he approved a rise in the debt ceiling from $14.3 trillion to over $15 trillion next year and promised us a mammoth austerity program. He agreed to cut $2.5 trillion over the next ten years from domestic programs like schools, roads, health case, and housing. As a concession, he was allowed to make just a little $3 billion cut in spending over a next two years, letting the really painful cutbacks impact us later. He calls this “a first step in solving the deficit crisis” but he apparently cannot see that long term reduction of the federal deficit requires a major near term economic stimulus. Rather, the Obama people feel that such small first year cuts in spending will “avoid harming the recovery” (White House 8/5/11) and still will allow the President to campaign in 2012 explaining how he is all in favor of austerity without anyone really having to feel any pain, at least not yet. The agreed-upon cuts will escalate exponentially after 2012. Can you follow the choreography here? Is George Bush's buddy Karl Rove still holed up in a back room at the White House?

Paul Krugman of the NYTimes opines: “In case you had any doubts, Thursday's (8/7/11) more than 500 point plunge in the Dow Jones industrial average and the drop in interest rates to near-record lows confirmed it: The economy isn't recovering, and Washington has been worrying about the wrong things. It's not just that the threat of a double-dip recession has become very real. It's now impossible to deny the obvious - that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery.” While the new budget compromise seems to cut $350 billion from the Pentagon through 2024, the result is actually to increase defense spending slightly above the level the Ministry of War wanted. Michael Hudson, one of our leading economists and a Professor at the University of Missouri has put it into historical perspective: “Parliamentary control over budgets was introduced in 1917 during WWI to prevent ambitious kings or rulers from waging wars, because that was the only reason that governments ran into debt. Almost all governments, for hundreds of years, have been in balance as to their domestic spending. War is what pushes up the debt, as it has done in the United States” em>(Democracy Now August 5, 2011). After all, the Pentagon spends 56 cents of every dollar of tax revenues.

Tea Party types have made tax policy the issue behind the debt ceiling debate: they would not agree to raise the debt ceiling, although Congress had already passed all the spending bills that made the deficit soar to this level, unless the President agreed not to raise taxes and not to plug leaks in the taxing system that benefited the wealthiest. The debt ceiling had been raised 83 times since 1963, but this is the only time when tax policy has been allowed to control the debate. The President threatened that there would not be enough money to mail out Social Security checks. This is a deliberate deception. The Social Security Administration and retired Americans that have their money in the program already own the Treasury bills they bought with payrolls deductions and can write checks whenever they so wish – for the assets are already in the bank. Our President's lie is just another way of to frighten us. Under current payroll deduction rates and with the cap on income that can be taxed set at $106,800, Social Security becomes insolvent in 2036. Should this cap be removed, and higher income Americans pay their true share, then the fund will remain solvent far into the future.

Can We Dig Our Way Out and If So When?
Ralph Nader (Truthout Aug. 5, 2011) feels that President Obama has amazingly surrendered to a minority of the Republican Party. “The Republicans never expected Obama to give in entirely on tax increases for the wealthy, and other tax escapees. He foolishly agreed in Dec. 2010 to tie the debt ceiling to a grand bargain regarding deficits and revenues and thus gave himself little room for later negotiation. Roosevelt was advised in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, that what we needed was spending cuts, but he was wary of the then unorthodox views of Maynard Keynes, and applied a most orthodox mixture of spending cuts and tax increases. By 1938, when conditions were far far worse, Roosevelt finally saw that he had no alternative but to begin pumping money into the economy by any and all means. It is sad to think that history may actually be repeating itself. Today, Obama has almost no weapons with which to stimulate the economy, find new sources of revenues, or force serious cuts in war spending. Maybe he can still invoke the 14th Amendment and ignore the congressional Super-Committee meetings this fall that are intended to cut spending another two trillion, but this President doesn't not appear to be that much of a risk taker. Not this close to his run for another term anyway.

41st Edition July 9, 2011
Jim Houle, Editor

There are over 440 large commercial nuclear power plants operating in the world, mostly in the 30 post-industrialized countries. Many of the largest commercial plants have already exceeded their 40 year design lives but continue to operate, despite serious maintenance problems in many plants, and in the United States, with weakened inspection and regulatory controls. The Chernobyl disaster in 1989 and the Three Mile Island melt-down in 1986 illustrated the danger and astronomical long term costs associated with generating electric power by the seemingly simple task of boiling water when it is done in a highly radioactive nuclear reactor and then spinning this steam through a turbine to generate electric power. No big nuclear power plants have been built in the post industrialized world since the late 1980s when it became obvious to all capitalists that the economics of nuclear power was very unattractive, the risks far higher than any profit-making electric power company could handle, and the disposal of radioactive waste products seemingly insolvable.

The Safety Myth in Japan
Since the end of the Cold War, we have drowsed along and most of us are not informed about the threat that aging nuclear power plants pose. And then the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami set off our alarm clocks. Today, Japan has three reactors where enriched uranium has melted through the high pressure containments and threatens to enter the aquifers. School children are now required to carry Geiger counters at all times and trace amounts of radioactive iodine and cesium have been found within the bodies of school children living as far as 60 kilometers from the stricken nuclear plants. TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima plants was panicked into pumping seawater into four reactors when reactor meltdowns occurred and where spent fuel cooling ponds lost all their water supply. Now this highly radioactive seawater is leaking out to the ocean as reactor melt-through occurs, compromising the reactor shells themselves. No solution to this catastrophe has yet been found. Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) has consistently down played the seriousness of the problem, refused to expand evacuation zones, and needlessly exposed the local population to radioactivity.

The Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Banri Kaieda, told the Vienna meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in June that “in Japan we have something called the 'safety myth' – an irrational and “unreasonable overconfidence in the technology of nuclear power”. Despite having been the world's only victims of nuclear war, and long after every major western country stopped building new plants, Japanese society holds to this “safety mythology”. Japan still has a number of big nukes in construction or on the drawing boards. (NYT Normitsu Onishi 6/24/11). TEPCO lacked the basic equipment needed for a disaster such as portable water pumps, robots capable of entering the containment structures and clearing debris, emergency equipment available to pump water to the spent fuel pools in the event of a power failure, and any disaster preparedness drills whatsoever. The power companies and the government have placed their focus on indoctrinating the public with the notion that nuclear power was absolutely safe. Any safety drills would only undermine that focus. PR (public relations) buildings were attached to nuclear plants to spread the message of safety as almost a “holy grail”. Initially set up as places where the male population could learn about technical side of nuclear power, the focus was changed after Chernobyl and the PR buildings converted into elaborate theme parks geared towards young mothers and children. School books have been rewritten throughout Japan to down-play nuclear accidents and to eliminate references to anti-nuclear activity in Europe.

Today, the Japanese Government holds to the radiation evacuation zone set at 20 kilometers even though radiation hot spots at high as 100 times acceptable levels were detected 60 kilometers away in the City of Fukushima (population 290,00). The government has responded to alarmingly high radiation levels by raising the acceptable radiation exposure for children from 1 milliseverts per year to 20 milliseverts. Despite government reassurances, tens of thousands of Japanese families have evacuated the greater Fukushima area and moved to the south and west. TEPCO warns that releases of radiation will continue and no solutions have yet been found for the problems of overheated reactor cores, dry spent fuel ponds, or radioactive water releases into the aquifer and the ocean front.

Deadly Dangers Right Here in the U.S. of A.
In the United States, 82 of our 104 commercial reactors have been in service more than 25 years and 66 of these have been licensed to operate another 20 years, well beyond what they were designed for. Problems with steel embrittlement in the reactor vessels, broken down and out of date control systems, and serious electrical malfunctions continue to plague these old plants while the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Agency) has weakened its system of inspections and relies increasingly upon the operators to detect and to report their own failings. (AP Impact Report 6/20/11). “Lord please lead me to confession booth”

In the State of California , we have four large reactors that match all too eerily the combination of The Three Deadly Dangers experienced at Fukushima: aging nuclear plants approaching the end of their design life; mindlessly located so as to straddle several major active earthquake fault; placed right on the shoreline where their emergency generators can be easily inundated and knocked out of operation by Tsunami waves. These emergency diesel driven generators supply power to the cooling water pumps essential to cooling the reactor cores and spent fuel pools. The four reactors, two at San Onofre near San Diego and two at Diablo Canyon north of Santa Barbara, were designed to withstand 7.0 and 7.5 Richter earthquakes respectively. The Fukushima quake was 8.9, almost 100 times more severe than what our American designers anticipated. Forty-five minutes after the quake, a 46 foot high tsunami wave hit the plant flooding the emergency generators and most of the control systems. Their break-water was only 5.7 meter (19 feet) in height. No breakwaters have even been erected at the San Onofre or Diablo Canyon. Furthermore, NRC only requires that emergency generators operate for four to eight hours, by which time it is a assumed that connections to the main power grid would be restored. The regional power grid in the Fukushima area was not reconnected for months.

Twenty-five miles up the Hudson River from New York City, the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant struggles along with numerous safety violations and maintenance worries. It is located within fifty miles of 20 million people. The two reactors at this site will compete their 40 year design life in 2013-15. The owner/operator Entergy has submitted an application to operate for another 20 years despite a catalog of NRC complaints including wholly inadequate fire detection and suppression system and many reports of radioactive leaks from spent fuel pools. The chief engineer of Fairewinds (a Burlington-based environmental and energy litigation consultants), Arnie Gunderson, explains that the emergency evacuation plans only cover a ten mile radius and the former head of Federal Emergency Management Agency, James Lee Witt, calls even this plan totally unworkable. (Harvey Wasserman, Huffington Green 6/16/11). Governor Andrew Cuomo has demanded the shutdown of Indian Point, while the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, wants its life extended 20 years and fears a blackout in the city more than death by radiation. A report released by the Union of Concerned Scientists showed that Indian Point had many engineering vulnerabilities, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has largely ignored. Governor Cuomo said the report indicates “That of all the 104 nuclear plants across the country, the Indian Point power plant is most susceptible to an earthquake because Reactor No. 3 is on a fault line.”

At Vermont Yankee, a reactor with the same vulnerable General Electric design as the 4 units at Fukushima, the government just granted a 20 year extension to its operating license. The Fermi Reactor in Michigan has been leaking and suffering breakdowns for years and has not been thoroughly inspected in decades. The Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey, our oldest reactor, has a myriad of corrosion cracking problems, plus leaky valves, bad electrical cables and the like. The Davis Beese plant near Toledo came within two months of a breech of the reactor from corrosion. The Catawba plant in North Carolina was found to have 8,000 corroded steam tubes, more than half its total.

The cooling ponds for spent fuel rods have not been adequately protected at any of the nuclear sites in American. There is no cooling water supply for these ponds except from the power grid, and we have seen in Japan how easy this can be get knocked off line by a major quake. Beyond all these problems inside the plants, we still have found no means to permanently store spent fuel and probably never will. The steel and concrete casks that have now been offered as an alternate to endless life in the fuel pools, will probably not last more than 100 years and are very expensive: as much as $7 billion for the US spent fuel alone. Germany is moving all their depleted uranium to such casks. Uranium 238 has a half life of 4.4 billion years while Plutonium 239's half life is 80 million years.

Europe is Cooling Off to Nuclear Power
Germany is shutting down all 17 nuclear power reactors by 2022 and 8 of these are already out of service. Switzerland will phase out all of their plants as well and Japan is moving in the same direction. Italian voters just took the nuclear power option off the table, despite Premier Burlesconi's sponsorship of a program to introduce large nuclear power plants into Italy. Italy currently imports nuclear power from France. The French Republic is the leading nuclear power producer in Europe with 59 plants generating 79% of their electricity. They have not indicated, despite the news from Fukushima, any intention to shut them down any time soon. Nevertheless, we can expect Europe to move away from nuclear power as their existing plants approach their design lives, as solar power becomes more practical and no longer financially unreasonable, and the bad news from Japan continues.

Obama Extends the Life of Old Plants and Wants to Build New Ones
An expose by AP entitled “Aging Nukes” reveals that the “NRC and the nuclear power industry have been working in tandem to weaken safety standards so as to keep aging reactors within the rules.” (Jeff Dunn, Democracy Now 6/28/11). When the embrittlement of steel around reactor vessels has been found to be too advanced to squeak back under the rules, plant owners have requested and received waivers or special exceptions so as to keep running. Bombarding steel reactor vessels with neutrons for 30 or 40 years causes the steel to become very brittle and easily shattered when it undergoes a force like an earthquake. Senators recentrly called for an investigation after they learned that leakage of radioactive tritium from corroded reactors and buried piping had been found at 48 of the 65 nuclear plant sites in the US.

Seemingly unconcerned by all this, Obama announced this Spring “A New Nuclear Generation” and requested $56 billion in loan guarantees for the builders of these new and improved nukes in America. Not surprising, all of the engineers, metallurgists and physicists who designed our 104 reactors way back in the 1980s are now retired. The only country where reactor vessels are currently fabricated is Japan. Like a bad dream, TEPCO, the Tokyo owner/operator of Fukushima, is a major investor, along with Toshiba, in the Obama's South Texas Project that would build 2 nuclear reactors by 2017. While no notification of cancellation has been made, TEPCO is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Helen Caldecott, an Australian physician and anti-nuclear activist, demands that all of the 104 reactors in the United States be shut down now. (Barry Vogel, Radio Curious, 6/26/11). She feels that this is the only real protection we have. When the next reactor springs a leak or goes into melt-down, it will be too late. She sees little if anything we can now do to protect ourselves from the radiation released at Fukushima nor from additional leakage of radioactive elements to the air and to the seas. She demands that the EPA begin to monitor radioactivity in fish and seaweed caught for US markets and that special testing of air for radioactivity, initiated immediately after Fukushima, be re-instated. The EPA had found in the weeks following Fukushima that radioactive materials like cesium and iodine-131 were being detected on US soil. Citing declining levels of radiation, the EPA has abandoned these extra tests in May. (Mike Ludwig, Truthout.org - 6/23/11).

It seems as if the heavens have rained upon Obama's nuclear picnic.