3/24/13 [LISTEN ANYTIME]
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Mark Pafford "How dare we' - (4min)
Sen. Elizabeth Warren "minimum wage"(5min)
Cindy Folkers Radiation Exposure (14min)
Kevin Kamps History 1 - (18min)
Kevin Kamps History 2 - (11min)
Mary Olsen Gender/No Safe Dose (16:30min)
Mary Olsen Fukushima Update (15min)
David Freeman former TVA Chair A - (15min)
David Freeman former TVA Chair B - 9min
==============================================
1. As of February, Bank of America was servicing more than 95,000 loans in foreclosure, followed by Wells Fargo, which was servicing 85,000 loans.
2. Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds’ chief engineer: Since I’ve been talking about Fuksuhima, I got an email that brought me to tears.
It was a woman who was in 10th grade at the time of the [Three Mile Island] accident. She was in chemistry and they were studying radiation and they had a Geiger counter hanging out the window for the entire semester.
They walk into the class at 10:00 in the morning of the accident and the Geiger counter is pegged.
So the teacher goes to phone as a responsible citizen, he calls Governor Thornburgh and tells him, “Look, I’m in Middleburg, I’ve got a pegged Geiger counter here. What should I do?”
Gov. Thornburgh’s office told this high school teacher, “Don’t do anything, we know all about it.”
So they kept the kids in school, and who got evacuated were the parents of the people who worked at the power plant, they all came by and grabbed their kids and got out of there. And the kids that didn’t have the inside scoop wound up staying in that town and got high exposures.
So do I think my country’s going to be any different than the Japanese? No way.
3.What me Worry???
President Obama wants to consign the financial crisis to the past and delegate the implementation of financial reform to others in his administration. But he needs to get personally involved. Why? Because Senator Carl Levin’s recent hearing on the JP Morgan Whale showed that nothing has changed at the largest banks or the bank regulatory agencies since the run up to the financial crisis. In the early months of 2012—two years after passage of the Dodd-Frank Act—JP Morgan acted deceptively, regulators remained clueless, and investors were the last to know about the true magnitude of the bank’s $6.2 billion in losses. Nevertheless, Republicans and some Democrats in Congress are today working to repeal reforms.
Yesterday, House Democrats joined with House Republicans on the Agriculture Committee to support several bills that would “fix” several Dodd-Frank provisions to regulate derivatives, effectively gutting measures designed to rein in bank abuses. Proponents of deregulation—both Democrats and Republicans—were hoping that these bills would move silently through the committee and then the Financial Services Committee, and then quietly onto the floor of the House for passage. Many Democrats, like Gwen Moore, Ann Kuster, and David Scott, support or even cosponsored these bills. And several others, most notably former Goldman Sachs executive Jim Himes, who currently serves as the Finance Chairman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, will help lead the effort when the bills come to the House Financial Services Committee.
Senator Levin issued a statement Tuesday saying, "It is incredible that less than a week after new JP Morgan Whale hearings detailed how the bank's London office piled up risk, hid losses, and dodged regulatory oversight, that some House members are again supporting the weakening of derivative safeguards." One bill, approved on a 31-14 vote, calls for altering a requirement that banks with access to deposit insurance and the Federal Reserve’s discount window move some derivatives trades to affiliates that have their own capital. The bill would allow banks—not their affiliates—to hold commodity, equity and structured swaps tied to some asset-backed securities. “You’re putting the taxpayers on the hook,” said Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the panel’s top Democrat, at the mark up. “This could come back to haunt you.”
4. House Bill 7011
cs/hb 7011
Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
TALLAHASSEE —
After fierce debate Friday between ruling Republicans and union-allied Democrats, the House approved an overhaul of the Florida Retirement System, the pension fund used by more than 620,000 teachers, law enforcement and other public employees.
The House voted 73-43 along party lines for the measure (CS/HB 7011), which would close the traditional pension plan to new employees. Beginning Jan. 1, new hires seeking a retirement account could instead only join a defined contribution investment plan similar to a 401(k) plan available to many private sector workers.
The legislation is a top priority of House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, who says the Florida Retirement System is underfunded. Weatherford also maintains the system will command increasing millions of dollars from Florida taxpayers to keep it afloat, although his stance is disputed by many experts.
“It’s fair. It’s fiscally responsible. And it’s time to act,” Rep. Ritch Workman, R-Melbourne, said in support of the bill.
Democrats, though, accused House Republicans of employing scare tactics to push through a proposal that is being dismissed by Senate Republicans.
During committee hearings, Democrats were supported by police and fire union representatives who packed Capitol meeting rooms to testify against the legislation.
“You’re using bogeyman tactics of how the taxpayers will save money. … It’s absolutely false,” Rep. Dwayne Taylor, D-Daytona Beach, told the House Friday.
Democrats said the legislation is not only unnecessary but potentially dangerous to the $136 billion pension fund, used by more than 623,000 state and local government workers and 335,000 retirees.
The Florida Retirement System is considered 87 percent funded. Most analysts acknowledge that 80 percent is the benchmark for a fund considered to be on solid financial footing.
Republican leaders, however, say the unfunded actuarial liability totals $19.2 billion — a level they say is alarming.
Still, those defending the fund also point out that the shortfall would exist only if every pensioner demanded their full payments at once, which analysts say would never happen.
Republicans, however, said the proposed change will ease the burden on taxpayers — with lawmakers poised to spend more than $500 million this year to reduce the unfunded pension balance.
Supporters also said that the changes proposed by the House would not affect any of those in the traditional pension, or drawing benefits as retirees.
“We’re being proactive,” said Rep. Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula. “This way, we don’t have some huge crisis in the future.”
Under a traditional, defined benefit pension, workers are promised a specific monthly payment based on earnings and years of employment. The State Board of Administration directs the fund’s investments.
In a 401(k)-style account, workers play a bigger role in directing how their individual retirement funds are invested. Their benefits can ebb and flow, based on the economy.
In the free-swinging debate, Democrats pointed out Friday that lawmakers have failed to adequately finance the pension the past three years, deepening the gap supporters of the bill are citing to support their call for change.
Republicans who spoke Friday on the House floor said that reducing the payments demanded to maintain the pension plan would free more state money for schools and other programs.
The debate, though, quickly turned heated.
Rep. Mark Pafford, D-West Palm Beach, told House members, “how dare we” take action that endangers the pensions of low-wage public employees.
Rep. Irv Slosberg, D-Boca Raton, told Republicans, “Go pick someone else’s pocket. Leave our public servants alone.”
Within the retirement system, workers can choose between the traditional pension or, for the past decade, an optional 401(k)-like plan. The pension remains the favorite, though, with more than 500,000 employees enrolled, compared with only about 100,000 in the investment plan.
The Senate proposal (CS/SB 1392) by Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, is significantly different from the House plan. It would give public employees an incentive by cutting their payroll contributions to 2 percent if they join the state’s 401(k) style investment plan.
If workers choose the traditional, defined benefit pension plan, they’d pay 3 percent. The only new workers required to join the investment plan would be senior managers, under Simpson’s bill.
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David Freeman, Engineer and Attorney, Former Chairman of TVA, Office of Science and Technology in charge of energy and the environment in the Johnson White House, and for 2 years under Nixon –The Rise and Fall of Nuclear Power
Cindy Folkers, Radiation and Health Specialist, Beyond Nuclear - Post-Fukushima Food Monitoring
Mary Olson, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Southeast - Gender Matters in the Atomic Age
Mary Olson, Director, Southeast Office, Nuclear Information and Resource Service
PO Box 7586 Asheville, North Carolina 28802
nirs@main.nc.us
828-675-1792
www.nirs.org
opener
here we are at Fukushima +2
nautilus point - nrc said no
gender & radiation (who gets the dose)
what do we mean by "dose"
chernobyl 4k becquerel per sq meter
much of Europe
no safe dose-replaces
icrp = international commission on radiological protection
http://www.icrp.org/news.asp
irpa - international radiation protection association
http://www.irpa.net/news.asp
under estimate of harm to women
there is a new "world health organization report" [deeply flawed]
external & internal exposure
note this will replace nuclear-sym-a
16:30 min (+/-)
===========================
http://youtu.be/FrGa_XfOeYE
Fukushima Update by Mary Olsen
#1
http://youtu.be/hfEfIJtTwV8
nirs.org
==========================
nuclear symposium part2a
Kevin Kamps, of Beyond Nuclear
Specialist in High Level Waste Management and Transportation, Beyond Nuclear – Seventy Years of Radioactive Risks in Japan and America
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/about/
lose history file - this replaces
History1 (18min)
History2 (11min)
The Nuclear Power Deception
U.S. Nuclear Mythology from Electricity "Too Cheap to Meter"
to "Inherently Safe" Reactors
by Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D.
and
Scott Saleska
April, 1996
http://www.ieer.org/reports/npd.html
============================
http://www.factbites.com/topics/List-of-nuclear-accidents
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Sunday, March 24, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
PNN 3/17/13 - Womens Rights are Human Rights
PNN - 3/17/13 call in 909-265-9104
Women's Rights = Human Rights
Women Leaders Speak
Faith Olivia Babbis 7:10 - 7:35PM
Emine Dilek – 7:36 - 8:01PM
Prof. Sommer Gentry 8:02PM - 8:27PM
Eve Samples 8:28PM - 8:58PM
Luis Cuevas Co-Host
====================================
Events
VEGGIE PRIDE PARADE NYC 2013
to take place early this year:
Sunday, March 24
Visit Web site:
http://www.veggieprideparade.org/
We believe that the Reduction of Youth Solitary bill (SB 812) will be heard by the Senate Criminal Justice Committee on Monday, March 18 from 1 – 3pm.
Are there people in your region, especially folks in committee members’ districts, who could contact their state senator to support the bill?
PDA CONFERENCE CALL
(Health Care for All)
Come to our Call - Healthcare For All!
What Day: Tuesday, March 19, 2013
What Time: 9:00 PM ET 8:00 PM CT 7:00 PM MT 6:00 PM PT
====================================
1. AMY GOODMAN:
What about the transcripts of decisions, of what's going on in court?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, the irony of this proceeding is that what led Bradley Manning to do what he did was that virtually everything the U.S. government does is cloaked in secrecy, everything it does of any significance, and that whistleblowing and leaks, unauthorized leaks, is the only way we find out about what our government is doing. And a perfect microcosm illustrating how true that is is the Manning proceeding itself.
There is more secrecy at this proceeding than there is even at Guantanamo military proceedings under George Bush. The docket is often classified and kept secret. Court orders are kept secret.
There is no transcript available, so Alexa O'Brien had to transcribe his statement, Bradley Manning's statement, using whatever instruments that she could. It really is a mockery of justice, what has taken place, and it really reflects the motivations that led Manning to do this in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: The decision that came down from the Supreme Court on surveillance, you see it in some ways tying into this.
GLENN GREENWALD: I see it completely connected. That decision last week -- in 2008, the Democratic-led Congress passed a law essentially authorizing massive new surveillance powers, allowing the U.S. government to surveil and eavesdrop on the conversation of American citizens without warrants. And instantly, the ACLU filed a lawsuit saying that this law, this major new eavesdropping law, is unconstitutional.
And they got all kind of journalists and activists and human rights groups to say that the mere existence of this eavesdropping power severely harms them. Five years later, the Supreme Court said, because this eavesdropping program is shrouded in secrecy, nobody can prove that they're being subjected to the eavesdropping, and therefore nobody has standing to sue; we won't even allow the law to be tested in court about whether it violates the Constitution.
So, this has happened over and over. The government has insulated its conduct from what are supposed to be the legitimate means of accountability and transparency -- judicial proceedings, media coverage, FOIA requests -- and has really erected this impenetrable wall of secrecy, using what are supposed to be the institutions designed to prevent that. That is what makes whistleblowing all the more imperative. It really is the only remaining avenue that we have to learn about what the government is doing. And that is why the government is so intent on waging this war against whistleblowers, because it's the only thing left that shines light on what they were doing. And those who want to stigmatize whistleblowing as illegal would have a much better case if there were legitimate institutions that were functioning that allow the kind of transparency that we're supposed to have. But those have been all shut down, which is what makes whistleblowing all the more imperative and the war on whistleblowing all the more odious.
2. Podesta Says Show us the Papers
John Podesta is chairman of the Center for American Progress and a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University. He served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff from 1998 to 2001.
From Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, we learned that the Obama administration is “struggling” with how to provide more information on its so-called targeted killing program; that senior officials have “talked about a greater need for transparency” about the program; and that we “will hear the president speak about this” in the future. After a limited document review by the Senate intelligence committee; a spirited 13-hour filibuster led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.); and a last-minute admission by Holder that the president does not have the authority to use drones to kill a U.S. citizen on American soil who is not engaged in combat, the White House is still bobbing and weaving on whether to share with Congress the legal opinions and memorandums governing targeted killing, which include the legal justification for killing U.S. citizens without trial.
The Obama administration is wrong to withhold these documents from Congress and the American people. I say this as a former White House chief of staff who understands the instinct to keep sensitive information secret and out of public view. It is beyond dispute that some information must be closely held to protect national security and to engage in effective diplomacy, and that unauthorized disclosure can be extraordinarily harmful. But protecting technical means, human sources, operational details and intelligence methods cannot be an excuse for creating secret law to guide our institutions.
In refusing to release to Congress the rules and justifications governing a program that has conducted nearly 400 unmanned drone strikes and killed at least three Americans in the past four years, President Obama is ignoring the system of checks and balances that has governed our country from its earliest days. And in keeping this information from the American people, he is undermining the nation’s ability to be a leader on the world stage and is acting in opposition to the democratic principles we hold most important.
This is why I say, respectfully: Give them up, Mr. President.
Begin by fully sharing with the congressional committees that have jurisdiction all of the documents used by your administration to legally substantiate and govern the targeted killing program, including the justification for targeting U.S. citizens. The law that directs our government’s activities should not be kept secret.
All branches of the people’s government have the right to know the rules and standards under which the other branches act. Congress has the power to oversee the conduct of the executive branch, and lawmakers must be permitted to use it. As Woodrow Wilson wrote: “The informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function.” Appropriate congressional oversight is critical in building long-term credibility with the public across the political spectrum for the actions the administration undertakes in the people’s name.
This isn’t to say that the executive branch is obligated to disclose information on operational details or case-specific profiles that are, deservedly, highly classified. But that information can be redacted without undermining the public’s understanding of the legal justification on which the government’s actions are based.
The American people have the right to know the laws they live under. In addition to allowing Congress to properly fulfill its oversight duties, the administration should make available to the public the criteria justifying the targeted killing of Americans and the safeguards put in place to protect against wrongful death.
This level of transparency is important for our democracy and for governments around the globe. The United States is not the only country with drone technology. We are not the only country with the ability to deploy cyberweapons. We are not the only country grappling with how to apply the rule of law — and the laws of war — when the nature of conflict has changed dramatically, and in a short time.
But we cannot lead if the American people are kept in the dark. We cannot lead if the world does not know the principles and laws that guide us, or if others can credibly say that our commitment to a government of the people, by the people and for the people is simply window-dressing, or that we sacrifice our constitutional principles when it is expedient.
James Madison said that “a popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy; or, perhaps, both.”
March 16 is Madison’s birthday. Mark it, Mr. President, by upholding the promise of openness and transparency you made in your State of the Union address last month. Release the legal guidance governing your targeted killing programs, including the justifications for targeting Americans, and take charge of the informed, free and vigorous debate that undoubtedly will follow.
3. First time since 1948, propaganda is now legal in the U.S.
Posted on February 11, 2013 by maxkeiser| 18 Comments
On 12/29/12, President Obama signed HR 4310, the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. Section 1078 (thomas.loc. gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.4310:) of the bill authorizes the use of propaganda inside the US, which had previously been banned since 1948 when the Smith-Mundt Act was passed.
History of Section 1078:
1) First version of NDAA is proposed, does not include domestic propaganda legislation (3/29/12) 2) Domestic propaganda legislation introduced by Rep. Thornberry as stand-alone legislation not related to NDAA, HR 5736, entitled ‘Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012.’ Defeated in committee vote. (5/10/12) 3) Exact text of HR 5736 introduced as Section 1097 of third version of NDAA, which was approved by the house. House sends bill to Senate. Section 1097 is entitled ‘Dissemination Abroad of Information about the United States.’ The text of this Section 1097 is virtually identical to that of HR 5736, except one word is removed (see below)*. (5/18/12) 4) NDAA referred to Senate. Section 1097 appears in fourth version of bill, ‘Referred in Senate’ version. In this version, there is a Section 1078, listed as ‘Authority for Corps of Engineers to Construct Projects Critical to Navigation Safety’ (6/19/12) 5) Section 1097 does not appear ‘Public Print’ version, nor does Section 1078. There is no section regarding ‘Dissemination Abroad of Information.’ (12/4/12) 6) In, ‘Engrossed Amendment Senate’ version, Section 1097 reappears as ‘Transportation of Individuals to and from Facilities of Department of Veterans Affairs.’ There is no section regarding ‘Dissemination Abroad of Information.’ (12/12/12) 7) Final version of bill is returned to House and Senate for re-approval. Section 1097 does not appear, and the ‘Transportation of Individuals’ clause does not appear elsewhere in the bill. Section 1078 reappears, now entitled ‘Dissemination Abroad of Information about the United States.’ The text of this Section 1078 is identical to the text of Section 1097 from the third version of the bill discussed in point #3. (12/21/12) 8) Obama signs this final version of HR 4310. (12/29/12)
That is the basic history of this bill. All information is sourced from Library of Congress.
*There is only one difference between the text of HR 5736 and Section 1078, and it is that the word ‘primarily’ from ‘intended primarily for foreign audiences’ appears in HR 5736 but is removed in Section 1078 of HR 4310 and the wording is ‘intended for foreign audiences.’
Below I’m going to paste the important parts of the bill’s text to help your writers. Bracketed text is mine. The beginning of the bill is misleading, and apparent reversals of clauses in it are made in subsequent subsections (however, if the reader uses a broad interpretation, they’re not really reversals, only expansions on the original meaning):
SEC. 1097. DISSEMINATION ABROAD OF INFORMATION ABOUT THE UNITED STATES. (a) United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 [aka Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which banned domestic propaganda]- Section 501 of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. 1461) is amended to read as follows: GENERAL AUTHORIZATION Sec. 501. (a) The Secretary and the Broadcasting Board of Governors are authorized to use funds appropriated or otherwise made available for public diplomacy information programs to provide for the preparation, dissemination, and use of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, its people, and its policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information centers, instructors, and other direct or indirect means of communication.
[using a broad interpretation, 'intended for foreign audiences abroad' could apply to any material that could at any point after release be potentially made available to any person who lives outside of the US] SEC. 208. CLARIFICATION ON DOMESTIC DISTRIBUTION OF PROGRAM MATERIAL (a) In General- No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States. This section shall apply only to programs carried out pursuant to the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. 1431 et seq.), the United States International Broadcasting Act of 1994 (22 U.S.C. 6201 et seq.), the Radio Broadcasting to Cuba Act (22 U.S.C. 1465 et seq.), and the Television Broadcasting to Cuba Act (22 U.S.C. 1465aa et seq.). This section shall not prohibit or delay the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors from providing information about its operations, policies, programs, or program material, or making such available, to the media, public, or Congress, in accordance with other applicable law. (b) Rule of Construction- Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors from engaging in any medium or form of communication, either directly or indirectly, because a United States domestic audience is or may be thereby exposed to program material, or based on a presumption of such exposure. Such material may be made available within the United States and disseminated, when appropriate, pursuant to sections 502 and 1005 of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. 1462 and 1437), except that nothing in this section may be construed to authorize the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors to disseminate within the United States any program material prepared for dissemination abroad on or before the effective date of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012.
[Note that section B expressly allows the use of propaganda domestically, as long as there is some possibility that at least one non-US-citizen will eventually receive the given communication]
This bill appears to not only open the door to legalization of the dissemination of propaganda in America, but would also legalize covert infiltration of media organizations by government agents and even the creation of media outlets that legally operate entirely as government fronts.
4. BP Appeals Spill Compensation Ruling
By REUTERS
Published: March 15, 2013
BP asked a judge on Friday to temporarily halt claims paid out as business economic losses, saying many were “fictitious” and “absurd.” In a filing in federal court in New Orleans, BP said it could be “irreparably harmed” because the payouts could cost billions more than it budgeted for when it agreed to a settlement last April. BP was appealing a March 5 ruling that upheld the way it is paying business claimants seeking compensation for losses caused by the 2010 spill.
5. 25 disturbing facts about psych drugs, soldiers and suicides Mike Adams
NaturalNews March 14, 2013
We are living in an age of upside-downs, where right is wrong, fiction is truth and war is peace. Those who fight the wars are subjected to their own house of mirrors via pharmaceutical “treatments.” Instead of providing U.S. soldiers and veterans with actual health care, the government throws pills at them and calls it “therapy.”
Stimulants, antidepressants, anti-psychotics, sedatives and pain meds are the new “fuel” for America’s front-line forces. While the idea of sending medicated soldiers into battle was unthinkable just three decades ago, today it’s the status quo. And the cost in human lives has never been more tragic.
Here are 25 disturbing facts about psych drugs, soldiers and suicides. They are disturbing because everybody seems to be pretending there is no link between psychiatric drugs and soldier suicides. So soldiers and veterans keep dying while the Pentagon (and the VA) keep pretending they don’t know why. (Sources are listed at the bottom of this article.)
1) 33% of the U.S. Army is on prescription medications, and nearly a quarter of those are on psychotropic drugs
2) In 2010, the Pentagon spent $280 million on psychiatric drugs. That number has since risen.
3) There are now over 8,000 suicides each year by U.S. soldiers and veterans; that’s over 22 a day
4) 33% of those suicides are attributed to medication side effects
5) That means medications are killing more U.S. soldiers and veterans than Al-Qaeda
6) 500% more soldiers abuse prescription drugs than illegal street drugs
7) Under the Obama administration, the number of veterans waiting for VA care has risen from 11,000 in 2009 to 245,000 today
8) More active duty soldiers die from suicide than from combat: 349 dead last year
9) The number of prescriptions for Ritalin and Adderall written for active-duty soldiers has increased 1,000% in the last five years
10) For every active-duty service member who dies in battle, 25 veterans die by suicide
11) Only 1 percent of Americans have served in the Middle East, but veterans of combat there make up 20% of all suicides in the United States
12) The suicide rate of active-duty soldiers in the Civil War was only 9 – 15 per 100,000 soldiers. The suicide rate of active-duty U.S. soldiers in the Middle East is 23 per 100,000. And casualty rates were far higher in the Civil War, meaning the Civil War was more psychologically traumatic.
13) In the Korean War, the suicide rate among active-duty military soldiers was only 11 per 100,000
14) To date, the Pentagon has spent more than a billion dollars on psychiatric drugs, making it one of the largest customers of Big Pharma
15) In 2010, over 213,000 active-duty military personnel were taking medications considered “high risk” by the Pentagon
16) In the years since the Iraq War began, twice as many soldiers of the Texas Army National Guard have died of suicide than in combat
17) Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls military suicides an “epidemic”
18) Of all the branches of the military, the Army has the highest number of suicides each year, almost 400% more than the Marines
19) Most active-duty soldiers who take psychiatric medications consume a combination of three to five prescriptions
20) The use of prescription medications by active-duty soldiers is largely unregulated. Soldiers are given a bottle of meds and sent into combat. If they run out of meds, they are given a refill, no questions asked.
21) The mainstream media says the answer to lowing suicides of veterans is to take away their guns so that they cannot shoot themselves. This is the logical equivalent to trying to fix your car’s engine by removing the “check engine” light.
22) The Pentagon is initiating new research (in 2013) to try to figure out why psychiatric medications cause soldiers to commit suicide. The research involves tracking brain activity by attaching electrodes to the skull.
23) One-third of military suicides are committed by soldiers who have never seen combat
24) In the last year, the military wrote over 54,000 prescriptions for Seroquel to soldiers, and all those prescriptions were “off label,” meaning the intended use has never been approved by the FDA as safe or effective.
25) Dr. Bart Billings, a retired Army Colonel and former military psychologist, refers to psychiatric drugs as a “chemical lobotomy” for soldiers.
6. My letter to Senator Nelson
Senator Elizabeth Warren has been asking tough questions of the Treasury the Department of "Justice" and the various "REGULATORS" who have the responsibility for overseeing BANKS (ever heard of HSBC?)
And asking under what conditions they might PROSECUTE a Bank or a Wall Street firm? HSBC, has been in the news, maybe you heard, they were laundering DRUG CARTEL MONEY and trading with Nations against whom we have sanctions. "Terrorist Nations" Iran, Somalia, Yemen etc. Sure there was a fine but no actual prosecutions. So Where were you when the freshman Senator was getting the usual pass the BUCK - "We're hoping to get hired by these guys RUN-AROUND?
You say your investigating SENIORS and ISSUES OF AGING. Thats NICE? When were you going to stand up against CUTS to MEDICARE? MEDICADE? When are you going to stand up not just against CUTS but for a COLA for Seniors.
Saying your investigating is "NICE" doing something to actually help is SO MUCH BETTER.
Please Senator, save the platitudes for the hard of hearing. We who actually watch what your doing - we see you you huddle with on the Senate Floor - When are you going to quit STUDYING SENIOR ISSUES and actually DO SOMETHING for Todays Seniors and tomorrows. Just don't tell me your ah, Studying Senior Issues - if you don't know we're hurting then just start setting out the CATFOOD
7. Fearing Radiation Poisoning from Fukushima, Lawsuit Against TEPCO Grows
Plaintiffs say Japanese energy company lied about dangers of working near destroyed nuclear reactors
Claiming that TEPCO, the Japanese energy company that owns the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor, knowingly withheld vital information about the levels of radiation released following the plant's disaster in 2010, a growing number of US service members are joining a lawsuit seeking more than $2 billion in damages.
Sailors aboard the USS Ronald Reagan scrub down the flight deck in an effort to remove any potential radiation contamination during Operation Tomodachi, March 23, 2011. (Photo: Kevin Gray/U.S. Navy, Flickr) Though first filed by US sailors stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan—which responded to the tsunami disaster by conducting search and rescue operations in the immediate aftermath—the suit has now grown to include nearly thirty others who fear they, too, were exposed to high levels of nuclear radiation. As many as one hundred other people are in the process of joining.
Reporting in Stars & Stripes says that "plaintiffs claim they have suffered a number of ailments they say are linked to their exposure, ranging from headaches and difficulty concentrating to rectal bleeding, thyroid problems, cancer, tumors and gynecological bleeding."
According to the official complaint: “At all relevant times, [TEPCO] knew that the reactors and storage tanks at the [Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant] were then leaking and emitting high levels of radiation,” the complaint reads.
And Stars & Stripes adds:
The Defense Department stands by its claim that while some service members experienced elevated levels of radiation, they weren’t high enough to make people sick. It started the Operation Tomodachi Registry so employees in Japan could look up radiation dose estimates.
Two years after the disaster, it remains incomplete; DOD spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said several reports are expected to be added to the site in the “next few months.”
____________________________
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
8. The War Powers Resolution (Section 4(b)) mandates that “the President shall provide such other information as the Congress may request in the fulfillment of its constitutional responsibilities with respect to committing the Nation to war and to the use of United States armed forces abroad.” Yet only insistent congressional pressure has forced the Obama administration to disclose some of its internal legal memoranda concerning drones, apparently in exchange for senate approval of Brennan’s nomination. It continues to resist the spirit of Section 4(b).
Hopefully, the Congressional Progressive Caucus will take up the reform of war-making powers as a major priority. Already, one of the CPC’s co-chairs, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), has expressed the need to reform and reverse the administration’s secret drone war. In the Senate, strong leadership on transparency has come from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Libertarian Republican senator Rand Paul is demanding to know whether the White House will unleash drone strikes on American citizens. Longtime activist groups like Code Pink suddenly are finding themselves in the center of a national conversation.
Three senators – Wyden, Mark Udall, and Susan Collins – who voted for Brennan’s confirmation also issued a call on March 5, “to bring the American people into this debate and for Congress to consider ways to ensure that the president’s sweeping authorities are subject to appropriate limitations, oversight and safeguards.”
By most accounts, this fuss over the Imperial Presidency was not supposed to be happening. The drone wars were supposed to be cheap for the taxpayer, erase American military casualties, and hammer the terrorists into peace negotiations. The assassination of Osama bin Laden was supposed to be the turning point. But even with the wars being low-intensity and low-visibility, the “secrets” have remained in the public eye, especially the drone war.
From a peace movement perspective, pressure from anywhere for any steps that will complicate and eventually choke off the unfettered use of drones will be an improvement over the status quo. For some like Ramberg, a reform of the 1973 War Powers Resolution is overdue. That resolution, which passed during an uproar against the Nixon presidency, actually conceded war-making power to the president for a two-month period before requiring congressional authorization. The original 1973 Senate version of the war-powers bill, before it was watered down, required congressional authorization except in the case of armed attack on the US or the necessity of immediate citizen evacuation. No president has ever signed the war powers legislation, on the grounds that it encroaches on the executive branch, although most presidents have voluntarily abided by its requirements.
Ramberg lists the US military actions undertaken after the War Powers Resolution “with minimal or no congressional consultation,” as: Mayaguez (1975), Iran hostage rescue action (1980), El Salvador (1981), Lebanon (1982), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (May 1991, 1993), Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1993-95), Haiti (1993, 2004), Kosovo (1999), leaving out Sudan (1998) and the dubious authorizations for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The immediate issue ripe for attention is the drone policy, conducted in Pakistan by the CIA in utter secrecy, but also spreading through Afghanistan, Mali, Somalia, and Yemen.
Drone attacks clearly are acts of war as defined by the War Powers Resolution, although the WPR was written mainly to contain the deployment of American ground forces. The drone war rests more squarely on the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), the underlying legal rationale for the “Global War on Terrorism.”
The challenge of reform, as opposed to emergency tinkering, will require prolonged efforts to amend and clarify both the WPR and AUMF. Allowing any president a 60-day period before seeking congressional authorization, as the WPR does, makes no sense in drone warfare. Instead, the president should be required to seek congressional permission if he wishes to target a clearly definable “enemy,” and be required to issue public guidelines, including necessary disclosure, governing the use of force he contemplates. That means:
First, Congress should establish a special inspector general, like the SIGUR created for Iraq and Afghanistan, to define, monitor and determine civilian casualties (“collateral damage”) from drone strikes. Currently that information is collected by the CIA, which has a conflict-of-interest, not to mention a curtain of secrecy.
Second, Congress will need to draft guidelines sharply narrowing - or even banning - the use of “signature strikes” which permit drone attacks against targets profiled according to identity, such as young males of military age (which could be civilians, participants in awedding or funeral, etc).
Third, Congress or the courts will have to restore the open-ended concept of “imminent threat” to its traditional meaning, as an immediate operational threat aimed at American citizens, US territory or facilities. Under the elastic formulation employed by Brennan and others, the simple fact of ill-defined jihadists holding meetings anywhere on the planet is an “imminent threat” justifying military action. And according to the CIA interpretation, the threat is a “continuous” one, carrying over from war to war. But if every “potential” threat is defined as “imminent,” and all the threats are continuous, the CIA, Special Forces and American military will be spread thin indeed from the jungles of the Philippines to the ghettos of Britain.
The 2001 AUMF was written to justify the unofficial military doctrine of the “long war,” developed by counterinsurgency advisers to Gen. Petraeus and the State Department, like David Kilcullen, who project a conflict of 50 to 80 years duration against ill-defined Muslim fundamentalists. The designated targets of the AUMF are “Al Qaeda” and “associated” terrorist groups. That overly broad definition authorizes a global war in the shadows against forces whose actual links to Al Qaeda are difficult to discern and who may or may not be threats against the United States. If targeted by the US, however, the likelihood of their becoming threats will only increase.
A recent example in a long list of these targets is Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the 40-year-old Algerian who may or may not have been killed last week in Chad. (New York Times, March 3, 2013) Belmokhtar allegedly carried out the January attack on an Algerian gas plant in which 37 foreign hostages died. He did so in retaliation against France’s military intervention in its former colony of Mali, and against Algeria’s siding with Western counter-terrorism policies. Otherwise Belmokhtar was nicknamed the “Marlboro Man” because of his decades-long involvement in smuggling cigarettes. Ten years ago he led one faction of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, before breaking away to form his own force in the Sahel.
The question is whether the 2001 war on terrorism authorization was written to cover a regional warlord like the “Marlboro Man” whose history is “smuggling, kidnapping and fighting for decades in the Sahel,” or whether the 2001 AUMF is being used as a blanket authorization for official kill lists and CIA drone assassins everywhere.
Finally, Congress should commission an independent body to evaluate whether the war on terrorism, including the drone attacks, has made Americans “safer.” The rise of the drones, and cyber-war as well, has a lulling effect on public opinion since American group operations are ending and casualties are down. But the 9/11 attacks took place unexpectedly as a result of burning grievances in the Muslim world. The official metrics of safety – how many jihadist “leaders” have been killed, whether insurgent attacks are up or down, etc. – ignore the incendiary hatred and desire for revenge building in Muslim communities suffering from remote drone attacks. A few empirical studies (see Robert Pape, Dying to Win, 2006) have shown a direct correlation between the rise of suicide bombers and US/Western occupation of Muslim lands, but the mass illusion of safety from terrorism tends to persist. A national conversation including the forgotten ways in which we are made less safe by the war on terrorism is sorely needed.
In perspective, the effort to prevent the restoration of an Imperial Presidency is long and politically difficult, something like reversing the mass incarceration policies and police buildups that followed the neo-conservative’s “war on gangs” campaign of the early 1990s, which the Clinton administration adopted. Many liberals in general, and Democrats in particular, cringe at being labeled “soft on crime” (or “soft on terrorism”). Some on the Left, on the other hand, seem to think that the threat of terrorism is manufactured. However, if another attack should occur against the US, the danger that a second Patriot Act will pass is real. Current US policies inadvertently provoke that possibility, with the drone strikes the equivalent of attacking a hornet’s nest. Therefore, the open window for “reining in” the President’s executive powers could close at any time. Hearings to reform of the 2001 AUMF and the 1973 WPR could not be more urgent.
Article originally appeared on tomhayden.com (http://tomhayden.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.
9. Japan fishing crippled 2 years after tsunami
Lucy Craft, Reporter: [...] This fishing boat is only 12 miles south of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. They’re out catching fish just as they did before the accident, but only a fraction of their usual catch. None of this will be allowed to go on sale — it’s only for testing purposes. Some fish still show high levels of radioactive cesium. Of the coastal fish tested, the government finds roughly 10 percent are safe to eat. [...]
Ken Buessler, marine chemist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute: Those reactors — either by the cooling water that’s still being put on there that’s leaking out, or the contamination of the site — are still releasing cesium to the ocean. [...]
__,_._,___
10. Japan Experts: Up to 93 billion becquerels a day may still be leaking into Pacific from Fukushima plant
NHK News translated by EXSKF, March 15, 2013: The density of radioactive cesium in the seawater inside the harbor at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant has stopped going down for some time. [...] The research group at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology did its own calculation in order to figure out why the density of cesium-137 in the seawater inside the Fukushima I Nuke Plant harbor has remained at about 100 becquerels/liter since spring of 2012 [...] According to the calculation, 44% of seawater inside the harbor is replaced by the current and the tides in one day. In order for the cesium-137 density to be what is published, 8 to 93 billion becquerels per day must be flowing into the harbor. [...]
NHK WORLD, March 15, 2013: [Experts] are calling for a thorough investigation. [...] According to their calculation, about 16.1 trillion becquerels of cesium 137 may have leaked into the sea in the year since June 2011. [...] Professor Jota Kanda, one of the team members, said that based on the data, it is unlikely the contaminants resulted from rainwater draining through the soil. He said groundwater may be the source. He said another possibility is damaged pipes in the compound. TEPCO officials [...] say they don’t think that radioactive substances are leaking into the sea from the plant compound. [...]
11. Continuing 137Cs release to the sea from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant through 2012 Source: Biogeosciences Author: J. Kanda, Department of Ocean Sciences, Graduate Faculty of Marine Science, Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology Date: 2013 Emphasis Added
Abstract
Rate of cesium-137 (137Cs) release to the sea from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant was estimated until September 2012. Based on publicly released data of 137Cs in seawater near the power plant by Tokyo Electric Power Company, a continuing release of radionuclides to the sea is strongly suggested. [...]
Introduction
[...] In this paper, I examined cesium-137 (137Cs) radioactivity in seawater around the power plant. 137Cs radioactivity in the harbour facility of the power plant was especially 10 informative. From these data, I obtained an exchange rate of harbour water with outer seawater. With the exchange rate and a relatively stable 137Cs radioactivity inside the harbour, I estimated a rate of continuous 137Cs release from the harbour to the sea. [...]
Results and Discussion
[...] 137Cs radioactivity at 2I in the unit 1–4 intake canal was consistently larger than at ULD in the main harbour (Fig. 2a). Also, 137Cs radioactivity at ULD was consistently larger than at T1 and T2 in the outer sea (Fig. 2a, b). [...] the consistent gradient of radioactivity between these waters indicates that radionuclides are still being released continuously somewhere around the reactor housings. [...]
I also conclude that 137Cs release from June 2011 until September 2012 is significant [...]
12. the inspector general's report on Iraq Rebuilding - reports that the expenditures just for rebuilding - Average $15M a day for 9yrs
13. ACLU OF FL REQUESTS:
We believe that the Reduction of Youth Solitary bill (SB 812) will be heard by the Senate Criminal Justice Committee on Monday, March 18 from 1 – 3pm.
Are there people in your region, especially folks in committee members’ districts, who could contact their state senator to support the bill?
14. Historic number of sea lions washing up in S. California — Has reached “epidemic proportions” — Center declares state of emergency
March 16, 2013: Along Southern California’s pristine coastline, ailing sea lions are turning up in record numbers. “We have a lot of little pups this year,” said veterinarian Lauren Palmer [...] Usually, around this time of year, there might be a dozen sick sea lions in San Pedro, said David Bard, operations director for the San Pedro Marine Mammal Care Center. But so far, the care center has taken in nearly 200 and counting. Last week alone, there were 50 new cases. [...] Last week, the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach declared their organization in a “state of emergency” as it continues to see an onslaught of California sea lion pups in need of medical attention.
March 12, 2013: “We don’t know what the problem is now,” said Susan Chivers, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. [...] Chivers said marine mammal experts are beginning to discuss the problem and gather data to try and better understand why the pups are dying. [...] “There’s something going on oceanographically that there’s not sufficient food available for the moms to nurse their pups or the pups, as they’re starting to eat on their own, to find,” said Chivers.
If the pace of stranded sea lions remains at roughly nine times more than normal [...] “There’s really not any indication that it’s slowing down,” [Pacific Marine Mammal Center spokeswoman Melissa] Sciacca said.
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Link to Faith's Video
http://www.facebook.com/l/UAQEOK_MOAQFo6m7xvecWIljkCoH8MT-SqzFmSQjxUm_5_w/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DLgNcyJiqJDM
http://alturl.com/x726w
VEGGIE PRIDE PARADE NYC 2013
to take place early this year:
Sunday, March 24
Visit Web site:
http://www.veggieprideparade.org/
No-Cuts.com
I've set up a petition at www.No-Cuts.com to make it easy for you.
Please sign it. If you'd like, you can explain why you, personally,
oppose cuts to these programs.
http://No-Cuts.com
=========================================
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/newmercurymedia/2013/03/17/pnn--womens-rightshuman-rights
Women's Rights = Human Rights
Women Leaders Speak
Faith Olivia Babbis 7:10 - 7:35PM
Emine Dilek – 7:36 - 8:01PM
Prof. Sommer Gentry 8:02PM - 8:27PM
Eve Samples 8:28PM - 8:58PM
Luis Cuevas Co-Host
====================================
Events
VEGGIE PRIDE PARADE NYC 2013
to take place early this year:
Sunday, March 24
Visit Web site:
http://www.veggieprideparade.org/
We believe that the Reduction of Youth Solitary bill (SB 812) will be heard by the Senate Criminal Justice Committee on Monday, March 18 from 1 – 3pm.
Are there people in your region, especially folks in committee members’ districts, who could contact their state senator to support the bill?
PDA CONFERENCE CALL
(Health Care for All)
Come to our Call - Healthcare For All!
What Day: Tuesday, March 19, 2013
What Time: 9:00 PM ET 8:00 PM CT 7:00 PM MT 6:00 PM PT
====================================
1. AMY GOODMAN:
What about the transcripts of decisions, of what's going on in court?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, the irony of this proceeding is that what led Bradley Manning to do what he did was that virtually everything the U.S. government does is cloaked in secrecy, everything it does of any significance, and that whistleblowing and leaks, unauthorized leaks, is the only way we find out about what our government is doing. And a perfect microcosm illustrating how true that is is the Manning proceeding itself.
There is more secrecy at this proceeding than there is even at Guantanamo military proceedings under George Bush. The docket is often classified and kept secret. Court orders are kept secret.
There is no transcript available, so Alexa O'Brien had to transcribe his statement, Bradley Manning's statement, using whatever instruments that she could. It really is a mockery of justice, what has taken place, and it really reflects the motivations that led Manning to do this in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: The decision that came down from the Supreme Court on surveillance, you see it in some ways tying into this.
GLENN GREENWALD: I see it completely connected. That decision last week -- in 2008, the Democratic-led Congress passed a law essentially authorizing massive new surveillance powers, allowing the U.S. government to surveil and eavesdrop on the conversation of American citizens without warrants. And instantly, the ACLU filed a lawsuit saying that this law, this major new eavesdropping law, is unconstitutional.
And they got all kind of journalists and activists and human rights groups to say that the mere existence of this eavesdropping power severely harms them. Five years later, the Supreme Court said, because this eavesdropping program is shrouded in secrecy, nobody can prove that they're being subjected to the eavesdropping, and therefore nobody has standing to sue; we won't even allow the law to be tested in court about whether it violates the Constitution.
So, this has happened over and over. The government has insulated its conduct from what are supposed to be the legitimate means of accountability and transparency -- judicial proceedings, media coverage, FOIA requests -- and has really erected this impenetrable wall of secrecy, using what are supposed to be the institutions designed to prevent that. That is what makes whistleblowing all the more imperative. It really is the only remaining avenue that we have to learn about what the government is doing. And that is why the government is so intent on waging this war against whistleblowers, because it's the only thing left that shines light on what they were doing. And those who want to stigmatize whistleblowing as illegal would have a much better case if there were legitimate institutions that were functioning that allow the kind of transparency that we're supposed to have. But those have been all shut down, which is what makes whistleblowing all the more imperative and the war on whistleblowing all the more odious.
2. Podesta Says Show us the Papers
John Podesta is chairman of the Center for American Progress and a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University. He served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff from 1998 to 2001.
From Attorney General Eric Holder’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, we learned that the Obama administration is “struggling” with how to provide more information on its so-called targeted killing program; that senior officials have “talked about a greater need for transparency” about the program; and that we “will hear the president speak about this” in the future. After a limited document review by the Senate intelligence committee; a spirited 13-hour filibuster led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.); and a last-minute admission by Holder that the president does not have the authority to use drones to kill a U.S. citizen on American soil who is not engaged in combat, the White House is still bobbing and weaving on whether to share with Congress the legal opinions and memorandums governing targeted killing, which include the legal justification for killing U.S. citizens without trial.
The Obama administration is wrong to withhold these documents from Congress and the American people. I say this as a former White House chief of staff who understands the instinct to keep sensitive information secret and out of public view. It is beyond dispute that some information must be closely held to protect national security and to engage in effective diplomacy, and that unauthorized disclosure can be extraordinarily harmful. But protecting technical means, human sources, operational details and intelligence methods cannot be an excuse for creating secret law to guide our institutions.
In refusing to release to Congress the rules and justifications governing a program that has conducted nearly 400 unmanned drone strikes and killed at least three Americans in the past four years, President Obama is ignoring the system of checks and balances that has governed our country from its earliest days. And in keeping this information from the American people, he is undermining the nation’s ability to be a leader on the world stage and is acting in opposition to the democratic principles we hold most important.
This is why I say, respectfully: Give them up, Mr. President.
Begin by fully sharing with the congressional committees that have jurisdiction all of the documents used by your administration to legally substantiate and govern the targeted killing program, including the justification for targeting U.S. citizens. The law that directs our government’s activities should not be kept secret.
All branches of the people’s government have the right to know the rules and standards under which the other branches act. Congress has the power to oversee the conduct of the executive branch, and lawmakers must be permitted to use it. As Woodrow Wilson wrote: “The informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function.” Appropriate congressional oversight is critical in building long-term credibility with the public across the political spectrum for the actions the administration undertakes in the people’s name.
This isn’t to say that the executive branch is obligated to disclose information on operational details or case-specific profiles that are, deservedly, highly classified. But that information can be redacted without undermining the public’s understanding of the legal justification on which the government’s actions are based.
The American people have the right to know the laws they live under. In addition to allowing Congress to properly fulfill its oversight duties, the administration should make available to the public the criteria justifying the targeted killing of Americans and the safeguards put in place to protect against wrongful death.
This level of transparency is important for our democracy and for governments around the globe. The United States is not the only country with drone technology. We are not the only country with the ability to deploy cyberweapons. We are not the only country grappling with how to apply the rule of law — and the laws of war — when the nature of conflict has changed dramatically, and in a short time.
But we cannot lead if the American people are kept in the dark. We cannot lead if the world does not know the principles and laws that guide us, or if others can credibly say that our commitment to a government of the people, by the people and for the people is simply window-dressing, or that we sacrifice our constitutional principles when it is expedient.
James Madison said that “a popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy; or, perhaps, both.”
March 16 is Madison’s birthday. Mark it, Mr. President, by upholding the promise of openness and transparency you made in your State of the Union address last month. Release the legal guidance governing your targeted killing programs, including the justifications for targeting Americans, and take charge of the informed, free and vigorous debate that undoubtedly will follow.
3. First time since 1948, propaganda is now legal in the U.S.
Posted on February 11, 2013 by maxkeiser| 18 Comments
On 12/29/12, President Obama signed HR 4310, the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. Section 1078 (thomas.loc. gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.4310:) of the bill authorizes the use of propaganda inside the US, which had previously been banned since 1948 when the Smith-Mundt Act was passed.
History of Section 1078:
1) First version of NDAA is proposed, does not include domestic propaganda legislation (3/29/12) 2) Domestic propaganda legislation introduced by Rep. Thornberry as stand-alone legislation not related to NDAA, HR 5736, entitled ‘Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012.’ Defeated in committee vote. (5/10/12) 3) Exact text of HR 5736 introduced as Section 1097 of third version of NDAA, which was approved by the house. House sends bill to Senate. Section 1097 is entitled ‘Dissemination Abroad of Information about the United States.’ The text of this Section 1097 is virtually identical to that of HR 5736, except one word is removed (see below)*. (5/18/12) 4) NDAA referred to Senate. Section 1097 appears in fourth version of bill, ‘Referred in Senate’ version. In this version, there is a Section 1078, listed as ‘Authority for Corps of Engineers to Construct Projects Critical to Navigation Safety’ (6/19/12) 5) Section 1097 does not appear ‘Public Print’ version, nor does Section 1078. There is no section regarding ‘Dissemination Abroad of Information.’ (12/4/12) 6) In, ‘Engrossed Amendment Senate’ version, Section 1097 reappears as ‘Transportation of Individuals to and from Facilities of Department of Veterans Affairs.’ There is no section regarding ‘Dissemination Abroad of Information.’ (12/12/12) 7) Final version of bill is returned to House and Senate for re-approval. Section 1097 does not appear, and the ‘Transportation of Individuals’ clause does not appear elsewhere in the bill. Section 1078 reappears, now entitled ‘Dissemination Abroad of Information about the United States.’ The text of this Section 1078 is identical to the text of Section 1097 from the third version of the bill discussed in point #3. (12/21/12) 8) Obama signs this final version of HR 4310. (12/29/12)
That is the basic history of this bill. All information is sourced from Library of Congress.
*There is only one difference between the text of HR 5736 and Section 1078, and it is that the word ‘primarily’ from ‘intended primarily for foreign audiences’ appears in HR 5736 but is removed in Section 1078 of HR 4310 and the wording is ‘intended for foreign audiences.’
Below I’m going to paste the important parts of the bill’s text to help your writers. Bracketed text is mine. The beginning of the bill is misleading, and apparent reversals of clauses in it are made in subsequent subsections (however, if the reader uses a broad interpretation, they’re not really reversals, only expansions on the original meaning):
SEC. 1097. DISSEMINATION ABROAD OF INFORMATION ABOUT THE UNITED STATES. (a) United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 [aka Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which banned domestic propaganda]- Section 501 of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. 1461) is amended to read as follows: GENERAL AUTHORIZATION Sec. 501. (a) The Secretary and the Broadcasting Board of Governors are authorized to use funds appropriated or otherwise made available for public diplomacy information programs to provide for the preparation, dissemination, and use of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, its people, and its policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information centers, instructors, and other direct or indirect means of communication.
[using a broad interpretation, 'intended for foreign audiences abroad' could apply to any material that could at any point after release be potentially made available to any person who lives outside of the US] SEC. 208. CLARIFICATION ON DOMESTIC DISTRIBUTION OF PROGRAM MATERIAL (a) In General- No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States. This section shall apply only to programs carried out pursuant to the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. 1431 et seq.), the United States International Broadcasting Act of 1994 (22 U.S.C. 6201 et seq.), the Radio Broadcasting to Cuba Act (22 U.S.C. 1465 et seq.), and the Television Broadcasting to Cuba Act (22 U.S.C. 1465aa et seq.). This section shall not prohibit or delay the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors from providing information about its operations, policies, programs, or program material, or making such available, to the media, public, or Congress, in accordance with other applicable law. (b) Rule of Construction- Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors from engaging in any medium or form of communication, either directly or indirectly, because a United States domestic audience is or may be thereby exposed to program material, or based on a presumption of such exposure. Such material may be made available within the United States and disseminated, when appropriate, pursuant to sections 502 and 1005 of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. 1462 and 1437), except that nothing in this section may be construed to authorize the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors to disseminate within the United States any program material prepared for dissemination abroad on or before the effective date of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012.
[Note that section B expressly allows the use of propaganda domestically, as long as there is some possibility that at least one non-US-citizen will eventually receive the given communication]
This bill appears to not only open the door to legalization of the dissemination of propaganda in America, but would also legalize covert infiltration of media organizations by government agents and even the creation of media outlets that legally operate entirely as government fronts.
4. BP Appeals Spill Compensation Ruling
By REUTERS
Published: March 15, 2013
BP asked a judge on Friday to temporarily halt claims paid out as business economic losses, saying many were “fictitious” and “absurd.” In a filing in federal court in New Orleans, BP said it could be “irreparably harmed” because the payouts could cost billions more than it budgeted for when it agreed to a settlement last April. BP was appealing a March 5 ruling that upheld the way it is paying business claimants seeking compensation for losses caused by the 2010 spill.
5. 25 disturbing facts about psych drugs, soldiers and suicides Mike Adams
NaturalNews March 14, 2013
We are living in an age of upside-downs, where right is wrong, fiction is truth and war is peace. Those who fight the wars are subjected to their own house of mirrors via pharmaceutical “treatments.” Instead of providing U.S. soldiers and veterans with actual health care, the government throws pills at them and calls it “therapy.”
Stimulants, antidepressants, anti-psychotics, sedatives and pain meds are the new “fuel” for America’s front-line forces. While the idea of sending medicated soldiers into battle was unthinkable just three decades ago, today it’s the status quo. And the cost in human lives has never been more tragic.
Here are 25 disturbing facts about psych drugs, soldiers and suicides. They are disturbing because everybody seems to be pretending there is no link between psychiatric drugs and soldier suicides. So soldiers and veterans keep dying while the Pentagon (and the VA) keep pretending they don’t know why. (Sources are listed at the bottom of this article.)
1) 33% of the U.S. Army is on prescription medications, and nearly a quarter of those are on psychotropic drugs
2) In 2010, the Pentagon spent $280 million on psychiatric drugs. That number has since risen.
3) There are now over 8,000 suicides each year by U.S. soldiers and veterans; that’s over 22 a day
4) 33% of those suicides are attributed to medication side effects
5) That means medications are killing more U.S. soldiers and veterans than Al-Qaeda
6) 500% more soldiers abuse prescription drugs than illegal street drugs
7) Under the Obama administration, the number of veterans waiting for VA care has risen from 11,000 in 2009 to 245,000 today
8) More active duty soldiers die from suicide than from combat: 349 dead last year
9) The number of prescriptions for Ritalin and Adderall written for active-duty soldiers has increased 1,000% in the last five years
10) For every active-duty service member who dies in battle, 25 veterans die by suicide
11) Only 1 percent of Americans have served in the Middle East, but veterans of combat there make up 20% of all suicides in the United States
12) The suicide rate of active-duty soldiers in the Civil War was only 9 – 15 per 100,000 soldiers. The suicide rate of active-duty U.S. soldiers in the Middle East is 23 per 100,000. And casualty rates were far higher in the Civil War, meaning the Civil War was more psychologically traumatic.
13) In the Korean War, the suicide rate among active-duty military soldiers was only 11 per 100,000
14) To date, the Pentagon has spent more than a billion dollars on psychiatric drugs, making it one of the largest customers of Big Pharma
15) In 2010, over 213,000 active-duty military personnel were taking medications considered “high risk” by the Pentagon
16) In the years since the Iraq War began, twice as many soldiers of the Texas Army National Guard have died of suicide than in combat
17) Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls military suicides an “epidemic”
18) Of all the branches of the military, the Army has the highest number of suicides each year, almost 400% more than the Marines
19) Most active-duty soldiers who take psychiatric medications consume a combination of three to five prescriptions
20) The use of prescription medications by active-duty soldiers is largely unregulated. Soldiers are given a bottle of meds and sent into combat. If they run out of meds, they are given a refill, no questions asked.
21) The mainstream media says the answer to lowing suicides of veterans is to take away their guns so that they cannot shoot themselves. This is the logical equivalent to trying to fix your car’s engine by removing the “check engine” light.
22) The Pentagon is initiating new research (in 2013) to try to figure out why psychiatric medications cause soldiers to commit suicide. The research involves tracking brain activity by attaching electrodes to the skull.
23) One-third of military suicides are committed by soldiers who have never seen combat
24) In the last year, the military wrote over 54,000 prescriptions for Seroquel to soldiers, and all those prescriptions were “off label,” meaning the intended use has never been approved by the FDA as safe or effective.
25) Dr. Bart Billings, a retired Army Colonel and former military psychologist, refers to psychiatric drugs as a “chemical lobotomy” for soldiers.
6. My letter to Senator Nelson
Senator Elizabeth Warren has been asking tough questions of the Treasury the Department of "Justice" and the various "REGULATORS" who have the responsibility for overseeing BANKS (ever heard of HSBC?)
And asking under what conditions they might PROSECUTE a Bank or a Wall Street firm? HSBC, has been in the news, maybe you heard, they were laundering DRUG CARTEL MONEY and trading with Nations against whom we have sanctions. "Terrorist Nations" Iran, Somalia, Yemen etc. Sure there was a fine but no actual prosecutions. So Where were you when the freshman Senator was getting the usual pass the BUCK - "We're hoping to get hired by these guys RUN-AROUND?
You say your investigating SENIORS and ISSUES OF AGING. Thats NICE? When were you going to stand up against CUTS to MEDICARE? MEDICADE? When are you going to stand up not just against CUTS but for a COLA for Seniors.
Saying your investigating is "NICE" doing something to actually help is SO MUCH BETTER.
Please Senator, save the platitudes for the hard of hearing. We who actually watch what your doing - we see you you huddle with on the Senate Floor - When are you going to quit STUDYING SENIOR ISSUES and actually DO SOMETHING for Todays Seniors and tomorrows. Just don't tell me your ah, Studying Senior Issues - if you don't know we're hurting then just start setting out the CATFOOD
7. Fearing Radiation Poisoning from Fukushima, Lawsuit Against TEPCO Grows
Plaintiffs say Japanese energy company lied about dangers of working near destroyed nuclear reactors
Claiming that TEPCO, the Japanese energy company that owns the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor, knowingly withheld vital information about the levels of radiation released following the plant's disaster in 2010, a growing number of US service members are joining a lawsuit seeking more than $2 billion in damages.
Sailors aboard the USS Ronald Reagan scrub down the flight deck in an effort to remove any potential radiation contamination during Operation Tomodachi, March 23, 2011. (Photo: Kevin Gray/U.S. Navy, Flickr) Though first filed by US sailors stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan—which responded to the tsunami disaster by conducting search and rescue operations in the immediate aftermath—the suit has now grown to include nearly thirty others who fear they, too, were exposed to high levels of nuclear radiation. As many as one hundred other people are in the process of joining.
Reporting in Stars & Stripes says that "plaintiffs claim they have suffered a number of ailments they say are linked to their exposure, ranging from headaches and difficulty concentrating to rectal bleeding, thyroid problems, cancer, tumors and gynecological bleeding."
According to the official complaint: “At all relevant times, [TEPCO] knew that the reactors and storage tanks at the [Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant] were then leaking and emitting high levels of radiation,” the complaint reads.
And Stars & Stripes adds:
The Defense Department stands by its claim that while some service members experienced elevated levels of radiation, they weren’t high enough to make people sick. It started the Operation Tomodachi Registry so employees in Japan could look up radiation dose estimates.
Two years after the disaster, it remains incomplete; DOD spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said several reports are expected to be added to the site in the “next few months.”
____________________________
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
8. The War Powers Resolution (Section 4(b)) mandates that “the President shall provide such other information as the Congress may request in the fulfillment of its constitutional responsibilities with respect to committing the Nation to war and to the use of United States armed forces abroad.” Yet only insistent congressional pressure has forced the Obama administration to disclose some of its internal legal memoranda concerning drones, apparently in exchange for senate approval of Brennan’s nomination. It continues to resist the spirit of Section 4(b).
Hopefully, the Congressional Progressive Caucus will take up the reform of war-making powers as a major priority. Already, one of the CPC’s co-chairs, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), has expressed the need to reform and reverse the administration’s secret drone war. In the Senate, strong leadership on transparency has come from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Libertarian Republican senator Rand Paul is demanding to know whether the White House will unleash drone strikes on American citizens. Longtime activist groups like Code Pink suddenly are finding themselves in the center of a national conversation.
Three senators – Wyden, Mark Udall, and Susan Collins – who voted for Brennan’s confirmation also issued a call on March 5, “to bring the American people into this debate and for Congress to consider ways to ensure that the president’s sweeping authorities are subject to appropriate limitations, oversight and safeguards.”
By most accounts, this fuss over the Imperial Presidency was not supposed to be happening. The drone wars were supposed to be cheap for the taxpayer, erase American military casualties, and hammer the terrorists into peace negotiations. The assassination of Osama bin Laden was supposed to be the turning point. But even with the wars being low-intensity and low-visibility, the “secrets” have remained in the public eye, especially the drone war.
From a peace movement perspective, pressure from anywhere for any steps that will complicate and eventually choke off the unfettered use of drones will be an improvement over the status quo. For some like Ramberg, a reform of the 1973 War Powers Resolution is overdue. That resolution, which passed during an uproar against the Nixon presidency, actually conceded war-making power to the president for a two-month period before requiring congressional authorization. The original 1973 Senate version of the war-powers bill, before it was watered down, required congressional authorization except in the case of armed attack on the US or the necessity of immediate citizen evacuation. No president has ever signed the war powers legislation, on the grounds that it encroaches on the executive branch, although most presidents have voluntarily abided by its requirements.
Ramberg lists the US military actions undertaken after the War Powers Resolution “with minimal or no congressional consultation,” as: Mayaguez (1975), Iran hostage rescue action (1980), El Salvador (1981), Lebanon (1982), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (May 1991, 1993), Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1993-95), Haiti (1993, 2004), Kosovo (1999), leaving out Sudan (1998) and the dubious authorizations for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The immediate issue ripe for attention is the drone policy, conducted in Pakistan by the CIA in utter secrecy, but also spreading through Afghanistan, Mali, Somalia, and Yemen.
Drone attacks clearly are acts of war as defined by the War Powers Resolution, although the WPR was written mainly to contain the deployment of American ground forces. The drone war rests more squarely on the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), the underlying legal rationale for the “Global War on Terrorism.”
The challenge of reform, as opposed to emergency tinkering, will require prolonged efforts to amend and clarify both the WPR and AUMF. Allowing any president a 60-day period before seeking congressional authorization, as the WPR does, makes no sense in drone warfare. Instead, the president should be required to seek congressional permission if he wishes to target a clearly definable “enemy,” and be required to issue public guidelines, including necessary disclosure, governing the use of force he contemplates. That means:
First, Congress should establish a special inspector general, like the SIGUR created for Iraq and Afghanistan, to define, monitor and determine civilian casualties (“collateral damage”) from drone strikes. Currently that information is collected by the CIA, which has a conflict-of-interest, not to mention a curtain of secrecy.
Second, Congress will need to draft guidelines sharply narrowing - or even banning - the use of “signature strikes” which permit drone attacks against targets profiled according to identity, such as young males of military age (which could be civilians, participants in awedding or funeral, etc).
Third, Congress or the courts will have to restore the open-ended concept of “imminent threat” to its traditional meaning, as an immediate operational threat aimed at American citizens, US territory or facilities. Under the elastic formulation employed by Brennan and others, the simple fact of ill-defined jihadists holding meetings anywhere on the planet is an “imminent threat” justifying military action. And according to the CIA interpretation, the threat is a “continuous” one, carrying over from war to war. But if every “potential” threat is defined as “imminent,” and all the threats are continuous, the CIA, Special Forces and American military will be spread thin indeed from the jungles of the Philippines to the ghettos of Britain.
The 2001 AUMF was written to justify the unofficial military doctrine of the “long war,” developed by counterinsurgency advisers to Gen. Petraeus and the State Department, like David Kilcullen, who project a conflict of 50 to 80 years duration against ill-defined Muslim fundamentalists. The designated targets of the AUMF are “Al Qaeda” and “associated” terrorist groups. That overly broad definition authorizes a global war in the shadows against forces whose actual links to Al Qaeda are difficult to discern and who may or may not be threats against the United States. If targeted by the US, however, the likelihood of their becoming threats will only increase.
A recent example in a long list of these targets is Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the 40-year-old Algerian who may or may not have been killed last week in Chad. (New York Times, March 3, 2013) Belmokhtar allegedly carried out the January attack on an Algerian gas plant in which 37 foreign hostages died. He did so in retaliation against France’s military intervention in its former colony of Mali, and against Algeria’s siding with Western counter-terrorism policies. Otherwise Belmokhtar was nicknamed the “Marlboro Man” because of his decades-long involvement in smuggling cigarettes. Ten years ago he led one faction of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, before breaking away to form his own force in the Sahel.
The question is whether the 2001 war on terrorism authorization was written to cover a regional warlord like the “Marlboro Man” whose history is “smuggling, kidnapping and fighting for decades in the Sahel,” or whether the 2001 AUMF is being used as a blanket authorization for official kill lists and CIA drone assassins everywhere.
Finally, Congress should commission an independent body to evaluate whether the war on terrorism, including the drone attacks, has made Americans “safer.” The rise of the drones, and cyber-war as well, has a lulling effect on public opinion since American group operations are ending and casualties are down. But the 9/11 attacks took place unexpectedly as a result of burning grievances in the Muslim world. The official metrics of safety – how many jihadist “leaders” have been killed, whether insurgent attacks are up or down, etc. – ignore the incendiary hatred and desire for revenge building in Muslim communities suffering from remote drone attacks. A few empirical studies (see Robert Pape, Dying to Win, 2006) have shown a direct correlation between the rise of suicide bombers and US/Western occupation of Muslim lands, but the mass illusion of safety from terrorism tends to persist. A national conversation including the forgotten ways in which we are made less safe by the war on terrorism is sorely needed.
In perspective, the effort to prevent the restoration of an Imperial Presidency is long and politically difficult, something like reversing the mass incarceration policies and police buildups that followed the neo-conservative’s “war on gangs” campaign of the early 1990s, which the Clinton administration adopted. Many liberals in general, and Democrats in particular, cringe at being labeled “soft on crime” (or “soft on terrorism”). Some on the Left, on the other hand, seem to think that the threat of terrorism is manufactured. However, if another attack should occur against the US, the danger that a second Patriot Act will pass is real. Current US policies inadvertently provoke that possibility, with the drone strikes the equivalent of attacking a hornet’s nest. Therefore, the open window for “reining in” the President’s executive powers could close at any time. Hearings to reform of the 2001 AUMF and the 1973 WPR could not be more urgent.
Article originally appeared on tomhayden.com (http://tomhayden.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.
9. Japan fishing crippled 2 years after tsunami
Lucy Craft, Reporter: [...] This fishing boat is only 12 miles south of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. They’re out catching fish just as they did before the accident, but only a fraction of their usual catch. None of this will be allowed to go on sale — it’s only for testing purposes. Some fish still show high levels of radioactive cesium. Of the coastal fish tested, the government finds roughly 10 percent are safe to eat. [...]
Ken Buessler, marine chemist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute: Those reactors — either by the cooling water that’s still being put on there that’s leaking out, or the contamination of the site — are still releasing cesium to the ocean. [...]
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10. Japan Experts: Up to 93 billion becquerels a day may still be leaking into Pacific from Fukushima plant
NHK News translated by EXSKF, March 15, 2013: The density of radioactive cesium in the seawater inside the harbor at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant has stopped going down for some time. [...] The research group at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology did its own calculation in order to figure out why the density of cesium-137 in the seawater inside the Fukushima I Nuke Plant harbor has remained at about 100 becquerels/liter since spring of 2012 [...] According to the calculation, 44% of seawater inside the harbor is replaced by the current and the tides in one day. In order for the cesium-137 density to be what is published, 8 to 93 billion becquerels per day must be flowing into the harbor. [...]
NHK WORLD, March 15, 2013: [Experts] are calling for a thorough investigation. [...] According to their calculation, about 16.1 trillion becquerels of cesium 137 may have leaked into the sea in the year since June 2011. [...] Professor Jota Kanda, one of the team members, said that based on the data, it is unlikely the contaminants resulted from rainwater draining through the soil. He said groundwater may be the source. He said another possibility is damaged pipes in the compound. TEPCO officials [...] say they don’t think that radioactive substances are leaking into the sea from the plant compound. [...]
11. Continuing 137Cs release to the sea from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant through 2012 Source: Biogeosciences Author: J. Kanda, Department of Ocean Sciences, Graduate Faculty of Marine Science, Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology Date: 2013 Emphasis Added
Abstract
Rate of cesium-137 (137Cs) release to the sea from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant was estimated until September 2012. Based on publicly released data of 137Cs in seawater near the power plant by Tokyo Electric Power Company, a continuing release of radionuclides to the sea is strongly suggested. [...]
Introduction
[...] In this paper, I examined cesium-137 (137Cs) radioactivity in seawater around the power plant. 137Cs radioactivity in the harbour facility of the power plant was especially 10 informative. From these data, I obtained an exchange rate of harbour water with outer seawater. With the exchange rate and a relatively stable 137Cs radioactivity inside the harbour, I estimated a rate of continuous 137Cs release from the harbour to the sea. [...]
Results and Discussion
[...] 137Cs radioactivity at 2I in the unit 1–4 intake canal was consistently larger than at ULD in the main harbour (Fig. 2a). Also, 137Cs radioactivity at ULD was consistently larger than at T1 and T2 in the outer sea (Fig. 2a, b). [...] the consistent gradient of radioactivity between these waters indicates that radionuclides are still being released continuously somewhere around the reactor housings. [...]
I also conclude that 137Cs release from June 2011 until September 2012 is significant [...]
12. the inspector general's report on Iraq Rebuilding - reports that the expenditures just for rebuilding - Average $15M a day for 9yrs
13. ACLU OF FL REQUESTS:
We believe that the Reduction of Youth Solitary bill (SB 812) will be heard by the Senate Criminal Justice Committee on Monday, March 18 from 1 – 3pm.
Are there people in your region, especially folks in committee members’ districts, who could contact their state senator to support the bill?
14. Historic number of sea lions washing up in S. California — Has reached “epidemic proportions” — Center declares state of emergency
March 16, 2013: Along Southern California’s pristine coastline, ailing sea lions are turning up in record numbers. “We have a lot of little pups this year,” said veterinarian Lauren Palmer [...] Usually, around this time of year, there might be a dozen sick sea lions in San Pedro, said David Bard, operations director for the San Pedro Marine Mammal Care Center. But so far, the care center has taken in nearly 200 and counting. Last week alone, there were 50 new cases. [...] Last week, the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach declared their organization in a “state of emergency” as it continues to see an onslaught of California sea lion pups in need of medical attention.
March 12, 2013: “We don’t know what the problem is now,” said Susan Chivers, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. [...] Chivers said marine mammal experts are beginning to discuss the problem and gather data to try and better understand why the pups are dying. [...] “There’s something going on oceanographically that there’s not sufficient food available for the moms to nurse their pups or the pups, as they’re starting to eat on their own, to find,” said Chivers.
If the pace of stranded sea lions remains at roughly nine times more than normal [...] “There’s really not any indication that it’s slowing down,” [Pacific Marine Mammal Center spokeswoman Melissa] Sciacca said.
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Link to Faith's Video
http://www.facebook.com/l/UAQEOK_MOAQFo6m7xvecWIljkCoH8MT-SqzFmSQjxUm_5_w/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DLgNcyJiqJDM
http://alturl.com/x726w
VEGGIE PRIDE PARADE NYC 2013
to take place early this year:
Sunday, March 24
Visit Web site:
http://www.veggieprideparade.org/
No-Cuts.com
I've set up a petition at www.No-Cuts.com to make it easy for you.
Please sign it. If you'd like, you can explain why you, personally,
oppose cuts to these programs.
http://No-Cuts.com
=========================================
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/newmercurymedia/2013/03/17/pnn--womens-rightshuman-rights
Sunday, March 10, 2013
PNN - the Foreclosure Foresome 3/10/13
Guests
Renee Shaker Author Confessions of a Reaganite
Ron Gillis
Susan Howai
Sylvia Landis
Code Pink Media - Medea Benjamin produced by Journalist and Independent Producer Stephen Malagodi
==================================================================
Listen to the Show [Listen]
ForeClosure Resources
www.NakedCapitalism.com
www.rongillis4staterep75.com
www.stopbrowardforeclosures.blogspot.com/
MORE FORECLOSURE RESOURCES
Email: TampsforeclosureGal@gmail.com
Florida House Bill: 87 - Speeds Up Foreclosure
Senate Bill 1666 - Speeds Up Foreclosure
Oppose the Bill
==================================================================
Events
Join US for COMMON SENSE at the SQUARE: An event to raise awareness and explore ways to promote Common Sense Gun Legislation
Thursday, March 21, 2013 4:30-6:30pm
Sanborn Square 72 N. Federal Highway
Boca Raton, FL 33432
State Legislative Action Alert!!!
House Floor Vote Expected This Week On Precourt Bill HB 655
Last Week, the State Affairs Committee passed the Precourt bill HB 655on party lines. It will go to the Rules Committee on Tuesday, March 12. The Rules Committee sets the calendar for Floor votes. The Rules Committee has to give a 48 hour notice for a Floor vote to occur. If the Rules Committee sets the calendar for a Floor vote on the Precourt bill on Tuesday, a final House Floor could take place on Thursday, March 14. The Precourt bill strips the home rule of local governments by restricting county level ordinances like our Miami-Dade Living Wage Ordinance, Wage Theft Ordinance and Domestic Violence Ordinance as well as for future Ordinances like Earned Sick Days.
Please contact by phone and e-mail every House member of the Miami-Dade Legislative Delegation and tell them to VOTE NO on HB 655. Tell them that local governments should NOT be stripped of their right to provide economic security for Miami-Dade’s working families.
Frank Artiles (R) – HD 118 – 850-717-5118 Frank.artiles@myfloridahouse.gov
Michael Bileca (R) – HD-115 – 850-717-5115 Michael.bileca@myfloridahouse.gov
Daphne Campbell (D) – HD-108 – 8850-717-5108 Daphne.campbell@myfloridahouse.gov
Jose Felix Diaz (R) – HD -116 – 850-717-5116 Jose.diaz@myfloridahouse.gov
Eddy Gonzalez (R) – HD-111 – 850-717-5111 eddy.gonzalez@myfloridahouse.gov
Kionne McGhee (D) – HD-117 – 850-717-5117 Kionne.mcghee@myfloridahouse.gov
Jeanette Nunez (R) – HD- 119 – 850-717-5119 Jeanette.nunez@myfloridahouse.gov
Jose Oliva (R) – HD-110 – 850-717-5110 Jose.oliva@myfloridahouse.gov
Sharon Pritchett (D) – HD-102 – 850-717-5102 Sharon.pritchett@myfloridahouse.gov
Jose Javier Rodriguez (D) – HD-112 – 850-717-5112 Jose.rodriguez@myfloriahouse.gov
Cynthia Stafford (D) – HD-109 – 850-717-5112 Cynthia.stafford@myfloridahouse.gov
Carlos Trujillo (R) – HD-105 – 850-717-5105 Carlos.trujillo@myfloridahouse.gov
Barbara Watson (D) – HD-107 – 850-717-5107 Barbara.watson@myfloridahouse.gov
Kit Rafferty
Executive Director
South Florida Jobs with Justice
1671 NW 16th Terrace
Miami, FL 33125
Phone: 305.324.1107 Fax:305.324.1119
Cell: 305.987.5251
The next scheduled meeting of the Democratic Club of Saint Lucie County
will take place on March13 at 7pm in Kings Plaza's IBEW Union Local 627 hall, 7652 S US Highway One, just South of Prima Vista. - DCSLC Regular Meeting Agenda - March 13, 2013
Monday March 11, 7:30-9 p.m. Public Lecture
Harry Targ, Professor of Political Science, Purdue University. The Empire in Disarray: Global Challenges to United States Power From Harry Truman to Barack Obama
The United States emerged from World War II as the "hegemonic" power in the international system. By virtue of its economic, political, and military strength, it fashioned a world based upon institutions which maximized opportunities for trade, investment, financial speculation, and economic development while maintaining military superiority. Over the subsequent sixty years, and responses to an increasingly resistant world, U.S. capacity to shape international relations has declined.
This presentation will briefly describe the "golden age" of United States power and the increasing resistance to it. It will concentrate on how the foreign policy of Barack Obama has responded to a more complicated world during his first term which can be characterized as wavering between an effort to restore U.S. hegemony versus "pragmatically" adjusting to the 21st century world of diversified power and influence. The current debate about drone warfare reflects this contradiction. Finally, the presentation will suggest ways in which the peace movement might encourage a more pragmatic foreign policy in the future.
Harry Targ received his Ph. D from Northwestern University in 1967 and has been teaching and writing at Purdue University ever since. His teaching and research interests include international political economy, foreign policy, Central America and the Caribbean, labor and politics, and U.S. and global social movements. He has published twelve books on foreign policy, Cuba and Central America, the impacts of plant closings, and collections of essays on international political economy, culture and politics, and American politics. His most recent book, Diary of a Heartland Radical (Changemaker, 2011) consists of a collection of over 100 blog essays from www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com.
He has been an activist in peace and justice organizations, the labor movement, and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism for many years.
Vizcaya Clubhouse
15150 Michelangelo Blvd
Delray Beach
Tell the gatekeeper that you're going to the Clubhouse program.
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Monday March 11, Tuesday March 12, Wednesday March 13
Florida Atlantic University, Peace Studies Program
Public Lectures: Claude AnShin Thomas, Vietnam War veteran, Buddhist monk, international speaker, teacher, writer, and non-violent advocate.
Monday March 11, 4-5:30 p.m. FAU Jupiter, AD 119 (Auditorium)
At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace
Tuesday, March 12, 7-9 p.m. FAU Boca, AL 189
The Roots of War, The Seeds of Peace
Public Lecture: Dr. Brian Shoup, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Mississippi State University.
Wednesday, March 13, 6:30-8 p. m. FAU Boca Raton, PA 101
Democratization and State-Building in Post-Conflict Societies
FAU’s Peace Studies Program, established in 1999 within the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, has brought together students, faculty, and community members to explore pathways to peace and the process of peace-building. As an interdisciplinary program, Peace Studies draws from a broad range of fields: anthropology, literary studies, political science, communication, history, ethics, social work and more to offer an undergraduate certificate designed to complement a traditional major in any field. The FAU Peace Studies Program sponsors speakers specializing in peace-studies-related issues, free and open to the public thanks to the generosity of the Chastain-Johnson Fund and the Schmidt Family Foundation.
www.fau.edu/peacestudies
Facebook (Peace Studies and Peace Studies Student Association [PSSA])
Prof. Doug McGetchin, Director of FAU Peace Studies dmcgetch@fau.edu or 561-799-8226
ADA (Americans with Disability Act) Statement: If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate fully, please contact Prof. McGetchin by email (above), phone (above) or TTY Relay station 18009558770. Please make your needs known as soon as possible to allow time for effective accommodations, preferably by four business days prior to the event.
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Tuesday March 12, 7-9 p.m. Lecture, Discussion, Raised Voices
Harry Targ, Professor of Political Science, Purdue University.The Influence of Marxist Ideas on the Performance and Politics of Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger
Professor Targ has teaching and research interests in U.S. and international political economy, U.S. foreign policy, organized labor and class struggle, plant closings and unemployment, and U.S. foreign policy in Central America. He has authored International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle; Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II; and co-authored Plant Closings: International Context and Social Costs. His book, Cuba and the United States: A New World Order? was published in 1992. A co-edited volume, Marxism Today, was published in 1996. Also, he has co-authored children's books on Guatemala and Honduras. More recently he has published Challenging Late Capitalism, Neoliberal Globalization and Militarism; and Diary of a Heartland Radical.
Then, join PinkSlip and Solidarity Singers in singing a couple of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs that Targ references in his lecture.
HOSTED BY BOB & PATTY BENDER AND JOAN FRIEDENBERG & MARK SCHNEIDER
At the home of Joan Friedenberg and Mark Schneider
5165 Palazzo Place
Boynton Beach
In Tuscany Bay, off Military between Woolbright and Flavor Pict
RSVP (required for gate) by Sunday March 10th 561-752-0946
Light refreshments will be served.
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Saturday March 16, 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. All Peoples’ Diversity Day
Fourth Annual Diversity Festival, free of charge!
In 2060 European Americans will not be dominant in our society. It’s no longer just a nice thing to connect with people who are different; it’s a necessity if we are going to live in peace and harmony.
Why an arts festival? The arts touch people’s hearts. Starting at 11 am, dazzling performances of dance, music and social theater spanning the globe will commence on the stage at 15-minute intervals. Over forty interactive, merchandise and food booths will provide wonderful things to see and do for the whole family.
To sign-up for free 9:30 to 11:00 am kid’s craft workshop call 561 495-9818.
Pompey Park (indoors)
1101 NW 2nd Street & NW 10th Avenue
Delray Beach
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Saturday March 16, 10 a.m. Deerfield Progressive Forum
Lynn Appleton, Professor of Sociology, FAU. Reagan-esque Revolution
Activities Center adjacent to LeClub at Deerfield Century Village East. Enter Century Village through the West Gate at West Drive (off Powerline between SW 10th St. and Hillsboro Blvd.). Tell the gatekeeper that you are attending the Forum. Take an immediate left after the gate and then another immediate left. Follow the road around until you come to a "T," then turn left into the parking lot. $5 donation requested.
954-428-1598
www.deerfieldprogressiveforum.org
====================================
1. The Obama Administration’s Latest Anonymous Leaks Aim to Justify Drone Killings of US Citizens (Updated)
Journalists for the New York Times have published a story that purportedly provides an account of what ultimately led the United States government to target and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric who had been born in the US. It also provides some details on what happened when US citizen Samir Khan and Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki were killed. However, importantly, the story consists primarily of “anonymous assertions” by “current and former Obama administration officials.”
…In anonymous assertions to The New York Times, current and former Obama administration officials seek to justify the killings of three U.S. citizens even as the administration fights hard to prevent any transparency or accountability for those killings in court. This is the latest in a series of one-sided, selective disclosures that prevent meaningful public debate and legal or even political accountability for the government’s killing program, including its use against citizens…
Though the introduction claims the story “highlights the perils of a war conducted behind a classified veil, relying on missile strikes rarely acknowledged by the American government and complex legal justifications drafted for only a small group of officials to read,” the Times essentially provides a forum for government officials to explain their side of the story and defend the decisions that were made in the process of killing an American without charge or trial.
It is insidious because, as the ACLU and CCR appropriately points out, “Government officials have made serious allegations against Anwar al-Awlaki, but allegations are not evidence, and the whole point of the Constitution’s due process clause is that a court must distinguish between the two. If the government has evidence that Al-Awlaki posed an imminent threat at the time it killed him, it should present that evidence to a court.”
Now, officials “anonymously assert that Samir Khan’s killing was unintended and that the killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi was a mistake, even though in court filings the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge any role in those killings. In court filings made just last week, the government in essence argued, wrongly, that it has the authority to kill these three Americans without ever having to justify its actions under the Constitution in any courtroom.”
The secrecy game being played by the Obama administration is a blatant abuse of power, and this story published by the Times only serves to further enable such game-playing.
Reporters write, “While the Constitution generally requires judicial process before the government may kill an American, the Supreme Court has held that in some contexts — like when the police, in order to protect innocent bystanders, ram a car to stop a high-speed chase — no prior permission from a judge is necessary; the lawyers concluded that the wartime threat posed by Mr. Awlaki qualified as such a context, and so his constitutional rights did not bar the government from killing him without a trial.”
The only problem is it should not be up to officials in the Executive Branch to decide when citizens do not deserve to enjoy the continued protection or privilege of constitutional rights. Courts are the only arena capable of determining a person no longer deserves judicial process. As such, the government should have to fully cooperate with a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and CCR that challenges the legality of the drone strike that killed Al-Awlaki and Khan, “as well as the separate strike that killed Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, in Yemen in September and October 2011.” It should be required to prove these deaths were not wrongful before a person like a judge.
The story continues and describes Office of Legal Counsel lawyers working for the Justice Department who “grew uneasy.” [cont'd.]
Journalists for the New York Times have published a story that purportedly provides an account of what ultimately led the United States government to target and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric who had been born in the US. It also provides some details on what happened when US citizen Samir Khan and Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki were killed. However, importantly, the story consists primarily of “anonymous assertions” by “current and former Obama administration officials.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have condemned the story:
…In anonymous assertions to The New York Times, current and former Obama administration officials seek to justify the killings of three U.S. citizens even as the administration fights hard to prevent any transparency or accountability for those killings in court. This is the latest in a series of one-sided, selective disclosures that prevent meaningful public debate and legal or even political accountability for the government’s killing program, including its use against citizens…
Though the introduction claims the story “highlights the perils of a war conducted behind a classified veil, relying on missile strikes rarely acknowledged by the American government and complex legal justifications drafted for only a small group of officials to read,” the Times essentially provides a forum for government officials to explain their side of the story and defend the decisions that were made in the process of killing an American without charge or trial.
It is insidious because, as the ACLU and CCR appropriately points out, “Government officials have made serious allegations against Anwar al-Awlaki, but allegations are not evidence, and the whole point of the Constitution’s due process clause is that a court must distinguish between the two. If the government has evidence that Al-Awlaki posed an imminent threat at the time it killed him, it should present that evidence to a court.”
Now, officials “anonymously assert that Samir Khan’s killing was unintended and that the killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi was a mistake, even though in court filings the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge any role in those killings. In court filings made just last week, the government in essence argued, wrongly, that it has the authority to kill these three Americans without ever having to justify its actions under the Constitution in any courtroom.”
The secrecy game being played by the Obama administration is a blatant abuse of power, and this storypublished by the Times only serves to further enable such game-playing.
Reporters write, “While the Constitution generally requires judicial process before the government may kill an American, the Supreme Court has held that in some contexts — like when the police, in order to protect innocent bystanders, ram a car to stop a high-speed chase — no prior permission from a judge is necessary; the lawyers concluded that the wartime threat posed by Mr. Awlaki qualified as such a context, and so his constitutional rights did not bar the government from killing him without a trial.”
The only problem is it should not be up to officials in the Executive Branch to decide when citizens do not deserve to enjoy the continued protection or privilege of constitutional rights. Courts are the only arena capable of determining a person no longer deserves judicial process. As such, the government should have to fully cooperate with a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and CCR that challenges the legality of the drone strike that killed Al-Awlaki and Khan, “as well as the separate strike that killed Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, in Yemen in September and October 2011.” It should be required to prove these deaths were not wrongful before a person like a judge.
The story continues and describes Office of Legal Counsel lawyers working for the Justice Department who “grew uneasy.”
…They told colleagues there were issues they had not adequately addressed, particularly after reading a legal blog that focused on a statute that bars Americans from killing other Americans overseas. In light of the gravity of the question and with more time, they began drafting a second, more comprehensive memo, expanding and refining their legal analysis and, in an unusual step, researching and citing dense thickets of intelligence reports supporting the premise that Mr. Awlaki was plotting attacks…
There is not much explanation for what makes it “unusual” to look at “intelligence reports” on Awlaki while putting together the legal justification for killing him, but one can imagine. Think about lawyers sitting around to craft the legal justification for going to war in Iraq (provided this happened) and contemplate how lawyers would feel pressured to give a favorable analysis that endorsed going to war if they saw the bogus or fabricated reports that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, viewing intelligence reports increases the likelihood the legal analysis produced is less sober and more in favor of whatever objective the administration wanted to achieve when it ordered up the analysis.
Then, there’s the part about how the reporters share how the two OLC lawyers—David Barron and Marty Lederman—”discovered a 1997 district court decision involving a woman who was charged with killing her child in Japan. A judge ruled that the terse overseas-killing law must be interpreted as incorporating the exceptions of its domestic-murder counterpart, writing, ‘Congress did not intend to criminalize justifiable or excusable killings.’”
It’s hard to follow this because it seems like there would be no justification for a mother killing her child. Apparently, they scoured all cases on unlawful killings and found that a judge had made this finding. They pulled it out to conclude, “When the government kills an enemy leader in war or national self-defense…the foreign-killing statute would not impede a strike.”
If that does not seem obscene, the reporters draw this conclusion, “They had not resorted to the Bush-style theories they had once denounced of sweeping presidential war powers to disregard Congressionally imposed limitations.” How so? It seems pretty medieval of the president to be claiming the authority to kill US citizens without charge or trial if they are “wartime enemies” simply on the basis that some judge made a statement in a case where a mother murdered her child.
In any case, there is further manipulation. The ACLU has sought “disclosure of the legal memoranda written by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel that provided justifications for the targeted killing of Al-Aulaqi, as well as records describing the factual basis for the killings of all three Americans, in a separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.” The Times fails to mention this case is ongoing.
The administration arguably used the newspaper back in June when officials spoke anonymously to the Times about the administration’s “kill list.” It has more or less regularly made statements to the press about drone programs—one controlled by the CIA, which the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge in court. (ProPublica documented with a graphic here.)
Leaks or unauthorized disclosures can be good and valuable to understanding national security policies but not when they are made in order to shield documents or records from being released to the public and not when they are made to undermine the pursuit of justice by families of victims of abuses of power.
When leaks occur in these instances, they function as propaganda—making it possible for presidential administration to continue to operate controversial programs in secret without any accountability for actions.
Update
Marcy Wheeler deconstructs the Times‘ story. She writes, “Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, and Scott Shane team up to provide the government’s best case — and at times, an irresponsibly credulous one — for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and the collateral deaths of Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.” She highlights a WikiLeaks cable that is conveniently ignored.
2. DELAYED CLEANUP
Two years after the triple calamities of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster ravaged Japan's northeastern Pacific coast, debris containing asbestos, lead, PCBs - and perhaps most worrying - radioactive waste due to the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant looms as a threat for the region.
So far, disposal of debris from the disasters is turning out to have been anything but clean. Workers often lacking property oversight, training or proper equipment have dumped contaminated waste with scant regard for regulations or safety, as organised crime has infiltrated the cleanup process.
Researchers are only beginning to analyze environmental samples for potential health implications from the various toxins swirled in the petri dish of the disaster zone - including dioxins, benzene, cadmium and organic waste-related, said Shoji F Nakayama of the government-affiliated National Institute for Environmental Studies.
Apart from some inflammatory reactions to some substances in the dust and debris, the longer-term health risks remain unclear, he said.
The mountains of rubble and piles of smashed cars and scooters scattered along the coast only hint at the scale of the debris removed so far from coastlines and river valleys stripped bare by the tsunami.
To clear, sort and process the rubble - and a vastly larger amount of radiation-contaminated soil and other debris near the nuclear plant in Fukushima, the government is relying on big construction companies whose multi-layer subcontracting systems are infiltrated by criminal gangs, or yakuza.
In January, police arrested a senior member of Japan's second-largest yakuza group, Sumiyoshi Kai, on suspicion of illegally dispatching three contract workers to Date, a city in Fukushima struggling with relatively high radioactive contamination, through another construction company and pocketing one-third of their pay.
He told interrogators he came up with the plot to ''make money out of clean-up projects'' because the daily pay for such government projects, at 15,000-17,000 yen, was far higher than for other construction jobs, said police spokesman Hiraku Hasumi.
Gangsters have long been involved in industrial waste handling, and police say they suspect gangsters are systematically targeting reconstruction projects, swindling money from low-interest lending schemes for disaster-hit residents and illegally mobilizing construction and clean-up workers.
Meanwhile, workers complain of docked pay, unpaid hazard allowances - which should be 10,000 yen, a day - and of inadequate safety equipment and training for handling the hazardous waste they are clearing from towns, shores and forests after meltdowns of three nuclear plant reactor cores at Fukushima Dai-Ichi released radiation into the surrounding air, soil and ocean.
''We are only part of a widespread problem,'' said a 56-year-old cleanup worker, who asked to be identified only by his last name, Nakamura, out of fear of retaliation.
''Everyone, from bureaucrats to construction giants to tattooed gangsters, is trying to prey on decontamination projects. And the government is looking the other way.''
During a recent visit to Naraha, a deserted town of 8,000 that is now a weedy no-man's land within the 20-kilometre restricted zone around the crippled nuclear plant, workers wearing regular work clothes and surgical masks were scraping away topsoil, chopping tree branches and washing down roofs.
''They told me only how to cut grass, but nothing about radiation,'' said Munenori Kagaya, 59, who worked in the nearby town of Tomioka, which is off-limits due to high radiation.
Naraha's mayor, Yukiei Matsumoto, said that early on, he and other local officials were worried over improper handling of the 1.5 trillion yen cleanup, but refrained from raising the issue, until public allegations of dozens of instances of mishandling of radioactive waste prompted an investigation by the Environment Ministry, which is handling decontamination of the 11 worst-affected towns and villages.
''I want them to remind them again what the cleanup is for,'' Matsumoto said in an interview. ''Its purpose is to improve the environment so that people can safely return to live here. It's not just to meet a deadline and get it over with.''
The ministry said it found only five questionable cases, though it acknowledged a need for better oversight.
Another probe, by the Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry found rampant labour violations - inadequate education and protection from radiation exposure, a lack of medical checks and unpaid salaries and hazard pay - at nearly half the cleanup operations in Fukushima.
About half of the 242 contractors involved were reprimanded for violations, the ministry said.
An Environment Ministry official in charge of decontamination said the government has little choice but to rely on big contractors, and to give them enough leeway to get the work done.
''We have to admit that only the major construction companies have the technology and manpower to do such large-scale government projects,'' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
''If cleanup projects are overseen too strictly, it will most likely cause further delays and labor shortages.''
Minoru Hara, deputy manager at a temporary waste storage site in Naraha, defended the 3,000 workers doing the work - the only people allowed to stay in the town.
''Most of the cleanup workers are working sincerely and hard,'' Hara said. ''They are doing a good job of washing down houses and cleaning up gardens. Such criticism is really unfair, and bad for morale.''
Labour shortages, lax oversight and massive amounts of funds budgeted for the clean-up are a recipe for cheating. And plenty of money is at stake: the cleanup of a 20-kilometre segment of an expressway whose worst contamination exceeds allowable radiation limits by 10 times will cost 2.1 billion yen, said Yoshinari Yoshida, an Environment Ministry official.
''While decontamination is a must, the government is bearing the burden. We have to consider the cost factor,'' said deputy Environment Minister Shinji Inoue as he watched workers pressure wash the road's surface, a process Yoshida said was expected to reduce contamination by half.
The cleanup is bound to overrun its budget by several times, as delays deepen due to a lack of long-term storage options as opposition among local residents in many areas hardens.
It will leave Fukushima, whose huge farm and fisheries industry has been walloped by radiation fears, with 31 million tons of nuclear waste or more.
Around Naraha, huge temporary dumps of radioactive waste, many football fields in size and stacked two huge bags deep, are scattered around the disaster zone
The cleanups extend beyond Fukushima, to Iwate in the north and Chiba, which neighbours Tokyo, in the south.
And the concerns are not limited to radiation.
A walk through areas in Miyagi and Iwate that already were cleared of debris finds plenty of toxic detritus, such as batteries from cell phones, electrical wiring, plastic piping and gas canisters.
Japan has the technology to safely burn up most toxins at very high temperatures, with minimal emissions of PCBs, mercury and other poisons.
But mounds of wood chips in a seaside processing area near Kesennuma were emitting smoke into the air one recent winter afternoon, possibly from spontaneous combustion.
Workers at that site had high-grade gas masks, an improvement from the early days, when many working in the disaster zone had only surgical masks, at most, to protect them from contaminated dust and smoke.
Overall, how well the debris and contaminants are being handled depends largely on the location.
Sendai, the biggest city in the region, sorted debris as it was collected and sealed the surfaces of areas used to store debris for processing to protect the groundwater, thanks to technical advice from its sister-city Kyoto, home to many experts who advised the government in its cleanup of the 1995 earthquake in the Kobe-Osaka area that killed more than 6,400 people.
But Ishinomaki, a city of more than 160,000, collected its debris first and is only gradually sorting and processing it, said the US-educated Nakayama, who worked for the US Environmental Protection Agency before returning to Japan.
''There were no technical experts there for the waste management side,'' he said.
''They did some good work with chemical monitoring but in total, risk assessment, risk management, unfortunately they did not have that expertise.''
Ultimately, just as they are choosing to live with contamination from chemicals and other toxins, the authorities may have to reconsider their determination to completely clean up the radiation, given the effort's cost and limited effectiveness, experts say.
Regarding the nuclear accident, ''there has been so much emphasis on decontamination that no other options were considered,'' said Hiroshi Suzuki, a professor emeritus at Tohoku University in Sendai and chairman of the Fukushima Prefectural Reconstruction Committee.
Some places, such as playgrounds, obviously must be cleaned up.
But others, such as forests, should just be left alone, since gathering or burning radioactive materials concentrates them - the opposite of what is needed since the more diluted they are, the better.
To a certain extent, policy is being dictated by politics, said Suzuki. Before the accident, residents believed they were completely safe, he said.
''The authorities want to be able to tell them once again that the area is safe. To do this they need to return it to the state that it was in before the accident.'' Naraha resident Yoshimasa Murakami, a 79-year-old farmer, said he has low expectations.
A month after the government started cleaning his spacious home he has not seen a major decrease in radiation, he said while sitting on a balcony overlooking his traditional Japanese garden.
He set a dosimeter on the grass. It measured radiation nearly five times the target level and almost the same as the 1.09 microsieverts per hour found when officials surveyed it in December.
Murakami had come to the house for the day.
He, his wife and daughter now live 50 kilometres away in Koriyama city. He visits a few times a week to keep an eye on the cleanup workers.
At nearly 80, Murakami says he doesn't mind about the radiation, but his wife does.
And if he returns, his other relatives and grandchildren will be afraid to visit.
''Then, what's the point?'' he said. ''I don't think decontamination is going to work,'' Murakami said.
''The nuclear crisis is not fully over, and you never know, something still can go wrong.''
3. Afghan leader alleges US & Taliban are colluding
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday accused the Taliban and the U.S. of working in concert to convince Afghans that violence will worsen if most foreign troops leave — an allegation the top American commander in Afghanistan rejected as "categorically false."
Karzai said two suicide bombings that killed 19 people on Saturday — one outside the Afghan Defense Ministry and the other near a police checkpoint in eastern Khost province — show the insurgent group is conducting attacks to demonstrate that international forces will still be needed to keep the peace after their current combat mission ends in 2014.
"The explosions in Kabul and Khost yesterday showed that they are at the service of America and at the service of this phrase: 2014. They are trying to frighten us into thinking that if the foreigners are not in Afghanistan, we would be facing these sorts of incidents," he said during a nationally televised speech about the state of Afghan women.
Karzai is known for making incendiary comments in his public speeches, a tactic that is often attributed to him trying to appeal to Taliban sympathizers or to gain leverage when he feels his international allies are ignoring his country's sovereignty. In previous speeches, he has threatened to join the Taliban and called his NATO allies occupiers who want to plunder Afghanistan's resources.
U.S. and NATO forces commander Gen. Joseph Dunford said Karzai had never expressed such views to him, but said it was understandable that tensions would arise as the coalition balances the need to complete its mission and the Afghans' move to exercise more sovereignty.
"We have fought too hard over the past 12 years, we have shed too much blood over the last 12 years, to ever think that violence or instability would be to our advantage," Dunford said.
The Karzai government's latest comments and actions come during U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's first visit to Afghanistan since becoming the Pentagon chief, a trip made in part to meet with Karzai. Hours after Karzai's speech, their joint news conference was canceled by officials citing security concerns, though officials said the two men still planned to meet privately.
The two men had plenty of contentious issues to discuss. The Afghan and U.S. government are negotiating a security pact for the long-term presence of American forces in Afghanistan — the difficulty illustrated when a deal to transfer a U.S. prison outside of Kabul to Afghan authority on Saturday fell through at the last moment.
U.S. and Afghan officials are also at odds over a Karzai demand that U.S. special operations forces withdraw from a province neighboring Kabul by Monday over allegations they participated in torture and extrajudicial killing — charges U.S. officials deny. As the deadline approached, Dunford told reporters he spoke to Karzai about the issue on Saturday and told him the U.S. is working on a plan to hand over security in the Wardak region to Afghan forces. He would not directly say whether the commandos will stay in Wardak when the deadline to leave comes on Monday.
Karzai raised another difficult issue when he denounced the alleged seizure of a university student Saturday by Afghan forces his aide said were working for the CIA. It was unclear why the student was detained.
Presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi said in an interview with The Associated Press that the CIA freed the student after Karzai's staff intervened, but that Karzai wants the alleged Afghan raiders arrested. The president issued a decree on Sunday banning all international forces and the Afghans working with them from entering universities and schools without Afghan government permission.
The CIA declined to comment. NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Les Carroll said that no NATO forces "harassed a university student" as described by the President's office.
In the incident at the Kandahar university Saturday, presidential spokesman Faizi said the raiders fired shots as they grabbed student Abdul Qayoum, and blindfolded him before taking him for interrogation at a CIA post that Taliban leader Mullah Omar once used as a home.
The CIA has trained an Afghan counterterrorist force several thousand strong, known as the Counterterrorism Pursuit Team, which works mostly in insurgent strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan. U.S. officials say they work in concert with the Afghan intelligence service, but Karzai frequently complains he lacks oversight over their operations.
Karzai said in his speech that any foreign powers that want to keep troops in Afghanistan need to do so under conditions set forward by Afghanistan.
"We will tell them where we need them, and under which conditions. They must respect our laws. They must respect the national sovereignty of our country and must respect all our customs," Karzai said.
Karzai offered no proof of coordination, but said the Taliban and the United States were in "daily negotiations" in various foreign countries and noted that the United States has said that it no longer considers the insurgent group its enemy. The U.S. continues to fight against the Taliban and other militant groups, but has expressed its backing for formal peace talks with the Taliban to find a political resolution to the war.
Karzai said he did not believe the Taliban's claim that they launched Saturday's attacks to show they are still a potent force fighting the United States. "Yesterday's explosions, which the Taliban claimed, show that in reality they are saying they want the presence of foreigners in Afghanistan," Karzai said.
____
Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor and Heidi Vogt contributed to this report from Kabul.
4. Fukushima Two Years Later
Global symposium in NYC addresses mounting medical and ecological consequences, critiques WHO report
Press conference highlights radiation exposures of U.S. military personnel and lawsuit against plant owners
March 11-12 – New York Academy of Medicine
NEW YORK, March 5, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two years after the March 11, 2011 triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex, important new research and new information is emerging about continuing biomedical and ecological impacts in Japan and worldwide. This information was largely omitted from the methodology of a recent World Health Organization report on Fukushima. But a unique public symposium, "The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident," March 11-12 at the New York Academy of Medicine will explore it, and draw its implications for the public's health and safety in Japan, the U.S. and globally. A project of The Helen Caldicott Foundation, the symposium is co-sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Press conference: 1:00 pm Monday, March 11 there will be a press conference at the symposium with U.S. Navy Quartermasters (retired) Maurice Enis and Jaime Plym . They suffered radiation exposure and health damage while serving aboard the USS Ronald Reagan during a Fukushima aid and rescue mission. 150 mission participants are reported to have developed tumors, tremors, internal bleeding, hair loss and other health problems they attribute to radiation exposure. Enis and Plym will discuss the lawsuit they joined against Fukushima nuclear plant owner TEPCO for misleading U.S. officials about the extent of radiation released.
Symposium: 9:00 am on March 11 the symposium opens with special videotaped messages from Naoto Kan, Japan's Prime Minister during the Fukushima crisis, and Hiroaki Koide, Master of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Safety and Control Specialist at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute (KURRI). Then an international group of leading experts including Dr. Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; Dr. Hisako Sakiyama of the Japanese Diet's Fukushima Accident Independent Investigative Commission; Dr. Alexey Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences and many others will present and participate in panels (the full list of presenters is here).
In addition to reassessing Fukushima's impacts, it will also critique the recent WHO report claiming fallout from the disaster increased cancer risks only minimally. "The Fukushima crisis is far from insignificant; it's a globally important public health issue," said symposium organizer Dr. Helen Caldicott. "The WHO report ignores critical data and sends the wrong message to the public. Increased incidence of thyroid abnormalities in children in the Fukushima Prefecture may be an early indicator of eventual increased incidence of thyroid cancers. Plumes of radioactivity from Fukushima are migrating in the Pacific towards the U.S. West Coast."
The symposium takes place March 11 – 12 at the New York Academy of Medicine, at Fifth Ave and 103rd St (enter on 103rd St), beginning 9am March 11. Journalists and bloggers are invited to attend and cover free of charge. Please RSVP to the media contacts listed below.
Media Contacts: Josh Baran, jcbaran@gmail.com 917-797-1799 Stephen Kent, skent@kentcom.com 914-589-5988
5. GE Mandatory Labeling Laws Introduced in Florida
Genetically engineered foods have been a concern of many for quite some time now. For years, it was more an issue for vegetarians, environmentalists, pseudo-hippies, and ethically concerned chefs than for the general population. Not anymore. The presence -- and subsequent failure -- of Proposition 37 on California's ballot in November brought the labeling debate into the mainstream. Now individuals ranging from soccer moms to celebrities are airing concerns over GE foods. And they're finally being heard.
In Florida, a state not traditionally known for progressive political agendas, Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel-Vasilinda and Sen. Maria Lorts Sachs have introduced mandatory labeling bills that will be considered over the next few months.
See Also:
- Frankenfish Salmon Swims Closer to Your Plate
- Anti-Frankenfood Group Lobbies State Senator Sobel on Genetically-Modified Food; Holds "GE-Free Cook-off" This Saturday
- Keep Your Frankenfood Outta My Publix (Or at Least Label It, Please)
The bills, HB 1233 and S 1728, will require labeling for all foods that contain more than 1 percent GE ingredients, if passed. This would include plants that have been altered with alien genetic material to create genetic combinations that do not occur naturally. Most processed food will fall under these labeling laws, as they usually contain byproducts of GE corn, soy, or cotton.
According to the executive director of Food & Water Watch, Wenonah Hauter, "Labeling GE foods is not a novel idea. The European Union specifically addresses the new properties and risks of biotech crops, requiring all food, animal feed, and processed products with GE content to bear labels. In fact, the EU is among nearly 50 developed countries that require the GE products they import from the U.S. to be labeled. Furthermore, a 2012 Mellman Group Study showed that 91 percent of U.S. voters favored having the U.S. Food and Drug Administration require labels on GE foods and ingredients."
During the November election, the opposition to California's Prop. 37 -- namely major agribusinesses like Monsanto -- outspent the "Yes on 37" campaign 5-to-1. If you look at the numbers, that's hardly a competition. The bill, which started off with a 2-to-1 lead in some polls, ended being defeated 53 percent to 47 percent. With bills coming to the floor in Florida, we're going to bet you a strong opposition will start coming out of the woodwork.
We're going to hope that proponents of Florida's mandatory labeling laws learned from California's failure. Agribusinesses in California were able to strike fear into the population by arguing rising food costs. Would the costs have actually risen? Did the cost of margarine rise when the trans-fat mandatory labeling laws went into effect back in 2006? We haven't heard any complaints. Well, aside from the processed-food industry.
We would like to see a cogent argument from mandatory labeling supporters highlighting overarching health and environmental effects of GE foods. Although there have been no studies published on human health consequences resulting from intake of GE-foods -- for studies to be considered valid, they must be performed over the span of two generations -- there have been startling results discovered from long-term studies on rats. In the peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, the study examined the health effects of rats fed a diet of NK603 Maize (the Roundup-resistant corn developed by Monsanto) over their two-year lifespan. It concluded that rats fed the NK603 Maize had a higher incidence of cancers and tumors and shorter lifespans than the control rats. Seventy percent of the female rats and 50 percent of male rats died prematurely, contrasted to 20 percent for female and 30 percent male in the control. No, we're not comparing human DNA to that of rats, but we do believe in red flags.
Quite frankly, it's fucking common sense. NK603 is a seed that had been developed to tolerate dousings of chemical weed killer. Late last year, we spoke to pharmacist and biochemist Dr. Rober Fishman of Post Haste Pharmacy in Hollywood. According to Fishman, all animals (including humans) have DNA receptors that are replenished through nutrients -- i.e., food. The genes in foods that have been genetically modified -- including hybrids and less evil incarnations -- have been changed and do not appropriately fit into gene receptors. These foods do not provide the same sort of benefits as foods that have not been tampered with, whole foods. If a hybrid tomato is considered to be a subpar form of nutrition, what do you think is the case with gene structure of a plant that is meant to outlive toxic dousings of chemicals?
According to Rehwinkel-Vasilinda, "Politically speaking, if legislators would know the imperative nature of the facts, the passion of the people supporting it, and the diversity of people who are lobbying for this bill to pass, there must be something to it. This is not just one political interest or lifestyle interest. If we want to get this bill a hearing, we need a lot of press, a lot of citizens bugging their local representatives, and I need more co-sponsors. Although, already Rep. Mark Pafford has signed on as a co-sponsor."
Although there is a long way to go in terms of getting this bill to the floor, there is a chance. Call your local representative or senator if you want to see GE labeling on your food.
6. Kyodo: High concentration of Fukushima radioactive substances found in land animals — Frog with 6,700 Bq/kg outside evacuation zone
High concentration of radioactive cesium found in land animals
TOKYO, March 2, Kyodo
A high concentration of radioactive cesium has been found in a range of land animals and insects in areas around the site of the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, providing a clue to a mechanism of radioactivity accumulation in the food chain, a study showed Saturday.
According to a survey by the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and Hokkaido University, over 6,700 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137 was detected in a frog captured in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, some 40 kilometers west of the crippled nuclear plant.
The finding suggests animals positioned relatively high in the food chain tend to accumulate more radioactive materials, the research team said.
7.Fukushima cleanup workers break silence: Ordered to dump ‘debris’ into river — Gov’t “appeared not to believe him”
Asahi Shimbun, March 1, 2013: CROOKED CLEANUP: Workers break silence to allege boss ordered corner-cutting [...] Three laborers involved in radioactive cleanup around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant have alleged that a supervisor told them to dump debris in a river [...] At a news conference in the Diet building on Feb. 28, the men said a foreman ordered them to discard fallen branches and leaves into a river in an upland forest in Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, in November 2012. [...] this is the first time that decontamination workers have publicly come forward. [...] The third man, in his 40s, said he related what had happened to officials at the Environment Ministry. He spoke to them for more than an hour, he said, but they appeared not to believe him. [...]
8. Hanford Tanks are Leaking
OLYMPIA –As most of official Olympia repeatedly hit the “refresh” button Thursday morning on their computers to catch the state Supremes’ decision on tax supermajorities as soon as possible, a handful of legislators got a briefing on something with the potential for far more impact to the state.
Jane Hedges of the state Department of Ecology explained the intricacies of nuclear waste tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, doing her best to calm the uproar over recent news that six of the supposedly stable tanks are, in fact, leaking.
Trying to explain most things at Hanford to laypersons can be a Herculean task. . .
To read the rest of this item, or to comment, go inside the blog.
…once you get past the standard line that there’s tons of really bad stuff down there from all those nukes we made for the Cold War but, thankfully, haven’t had to use. So Hedges brought it down to a level that even legislators and reporters could understand.
First of all, the tanks are big. The largest are the size of a basketball court with a 75-foot wall around it. Inside the tanks are a “stew of different materials” that form a radioactive sludge, from which the liquid was supposed to have been pumped out years ago.
The sludge is about the consistency of peanut butter, Hedges said, but sometimes the interstitial liquid raises to the top. The what? Think organic peanut butter, she said. When it sits too long, it gets that oil layer on the top.
Of the 177 tanks, 149 only have a single wall, or shell, and 67 of those were “suspected leakers”, but the rest were thought to be secure. Thought to be is a relative term, because in a container that big, a drop of even a fraction of an inch can represent many gallons of waste. You can’t just drop a giant dipstick into the tank.
As Hedges explained, there’s no easy way to get an extremely accurate measurement because lowering cameras or instruments into the tanks isn’t practical. The stuff inside melts the instruments, and eats rubber and plastic. The methods they do have showed some minor fluctuations that could have been anomalies until further testing showed that six supposedly secure tanks are leaking as much as 1,000 gallons of radioactive liquid a year.
Getting the liquid out of the tanks is a problem. First, there’s no good place to put it right now, because the more secure double-shelled tanks are also pretty full. Second, there’s the danger of triggering evaporation of the liquid, which would cause a tank to heat up and create a deflagration.
“In our common words, a ‘Boom,’” Hedges said. Hanford was responsible for making things that could create the world’s biggest booms, but a boom in a tank is to be greatly avoided.
As chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, got to ask the question that most people’s minds were forming: Is there a safety threat?
“There is no threat to anyone at this time,” Hedges said. The leaking tanks are between 200 and 300 feet above groundwater, at least five miles from the Columbia River. They’re leaking below ground, so there’s no immediate danger to workers or the nearby communities, and a system to pump contaminated water out and clean it.
Long-term, though, the state needs the feds to get the radioactive waste into a more permanent solution, she said.
9. The Japanese Lied and are Lying
Steven Starr, Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri/Senior Scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility: The Japanese basically lied about what happened with the reactors for months. They said they were trying to prevent a meltdown, when in fact they knew within the first couple of days Reactors 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi had melted down, and they actually melted through the steel containment vessels.
So there was a worst case scenario that they were trying to hide, they even knew that at that time enormous amounts of radiation were released over Japan and some of it even went over Tokyo [...]
The melted core cracked the containment vessel, there really is no containment. So as soon as they pump the water in it leaks out again.
10. Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You
Data companies are scooping up enormous amounts of information about almost every American. They sell information about whether you're pregnant or divorced or trying to lose weight, about how rich you are and what kinds of cars you have.
Regulators and some in Congress have been taking a closer look at these so-called data brokers — and are beginning to push the companies to give consumers more information and control over what happens to their data.
But many people still don't even know that data brokers exist.
Here's a look at what we know about the consumer data industry.
How much do these companies know about individual people?
They start with the basics, like names, addresses and contact information, and add on demographics, like age, race, occupation and "education level," according to consumer data firm Acxiom's overview of its various categories.
But that's just the beginning: The companies collect lists of people experiencing "life-event triggers" like getting married, buying a home, sending a kid to college — or even getting divorced.
Credit reporting giant Experian has a separate marketing services division, which sells lists of "names of expectant parents and families with newborns" that are "updated weekly."
The companies also collect data about your hobbies and many of the purchases you make. Want to buy a list of people who read romance novels? Epsilon can sell you that, as well as a list of people who donate to international aid charities.
A subsidiary of credit reporting company Equifax even collects detailed salary and paystub information for roughly 38 percent of employed Americans, as NBC news reported. As part of handling employee verification requests, the company gets the information directly from employers.
Equifax said in a statement that the information is only sold to customers "who have been verified through a detailed credentialing process." It added that if a mortgage company or other lender wants to access information about your salary, they must obtain your permission to do so.
Of course, data companies typically don't have all of this information on any one person. As Acxiom notes in its overview, "No individual record ever contains all the possible data." And some of the data these companies sell is really just a guess about your background or preferences, based on the characteristics of your neighborhood, or other people in a similar age or demographic group.
Where are they getting all this info?
The stores where you shop sell it to them.
Datalogix, for instance, which collects information from store loyalty cards, says it has information on more than $1 trillion in consumer spending "across 1400+ leading brands." It doesn't say which ones. (Datalogix did not respond to our requests for comment.)
Data companies usually refuse to say exactly what companies sell them information, citing competitive reasons. And retailers also don't make it easy for you to find out whether they're selling your information.
But thanks to California's "Shine the Light" law, researchers at U.C. Berkeley were able to get a small glimpse of how companies sell or share your data. The study recruited volunteers to ask more than 80 companies how the volunteers' information was being shared.
Only two companies actually responded with details about how volunteers' information had been shared. Upscale furniture store Restoration Hardware said that it had sent "your name, address and what you purchased" to seven other companies, including a data "cooperative" that allows retailers to pool data about customer transactions, and another company that later became part of Datalogix. (Restoration Hardware hasn't responded to our request for comment.)
Walt Disney also responded and described sharing even more information: not just a person's name and address and what they purchased, but their age, occupation, and the number, age and gender of their children. It listed companies that received data, among them companies owned by Disney, like ABC and ESPN, as well as others, including Honda, HarperCollins Publishing, Almay cosmetics, and yogurt company Dannon.
But Disney spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said that Disney's letter, sent in 2007, "wasn't clear" about how the data was actually shared with different companies on the list. Outside companies like Honda only received personal information as part of a contest, sweepstakes, or other joint promotion that they had done with Disney, Mucha said. The data was shared "for the fulfillment of that contest prize, not for their own marketing purposes."
Where else do data brokers get information about me?
Government records and other publicly available information, including some sources that may surprise you. Your state Department of Motor Vehicles, for instance, may sell personal information — like your name, address, and the type of vehicles you own — to data companies, although only for certain permitted purposes, including identify verification.
Public voting records, which include information about your party registration and how often you vote, can also be bought and sold for commercial purposes in some states.
Are there limits to the kinds of data these companies can buy and sell?
Yes, certain kinds of sensitive data are protected — but much of your information can be bought and sold without any input from you.
Federal law protects the confidentiality of your medical records and your conversations with your doctor. There are also strict rules regarding the sale of information used to determine your credit-worthiness, or your eligibility for employment, insurance and housing. For instance, consumers have the right to view and correct their own credit reports, and potential employers have to ask for your consent before they buy a credit report about you.
Other than certain kinds of protected data — including medical records and data used for credit reports — consumers have no legal right to control or even monitor how information about them is bought and sold. As the FTC notes, "There are no current laws requiring data brokers to maintain the privacy of consumer data unless they use that data for credit, employment, insurance, housing, or other similar purposes."
So they don't sell information about my health?
Actually, they do.
Data companies can capture information about your "interests" in certain health conditions based on what you buy — or what you search for online. Datalogix has lists of people classified as "allergy sufferers" and "dieters." Acxiom sells data on whether an individual has an "online search propensity" for a certain "ailment or prescription."
Consumer data is also beginning to be used to evaluate whether you're making healthy choices.
One health insurance company recently bought data on more than three million people's consumer purchases in order to flag health-related actions, like purchasing plus-sized clothing, the Wall Street Journal reported. (The company bought purchasing information for current plan members, not as part of screening people for potential coverage.)
Spokeswoman Michelle Douglas said that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina would use the data to target free programming offers to their customers.
Douglas suggested that it might be more valuable for companies to use consumer data "to determine ways to help me improve my health" rather than "to buy my data to send me pre-paid credit card applications or catalogs full of stuff they want me to buy."
Do companies collect information about my social media profiles and what I do online?
Yes.
As we highlighted last year, some data companies record — and then resell — all kinds of information you post online, including your screen names, website addresses, interests, hometown and professional history, and how many friends or followers you have.
Acxiom said it collects information about which social media sites individual people use, and "whether they are a heavy or a light user," but that they do not collect information about "individual postings" or your "lists of friends."
More traditional consumer data can also be connected with information about what you do online. Datalogix, the company that collects loyalty card data, has partnered with Facebook to track whether Facebook users who see ads for certain products actually end up buying them at local stores, as the Financial Times reported last year.
Is there a way to find out exactly what these data companies know about me?
Not really.
You have the right to review and correct your credit report. But with marketing data, there's often no way to know exactly what information is attached to your name — or whether it's accurate.
Most companies offer, at best, a partial picture.
While Acxiom lets consumers review some of the information the company sells about them, New York Times reporter Natasha Singer discovered this summer that only a sliver of information is shared, including whether you have a prison record or bankruptcy filings.
When Singer finally received her report, all it included was a record of her residential addresses.
Some companies do offer more access. A spokeswoman for Epsilon said it allows consumers to review "high level information" about their data — like whether or not you're listed as making a purchase in the "home furnishings" category. (Requests to review this information cost $5 and can only be made by postal mail.)
RapLeaf, a company that advertises that it has "real-time data" on 80 percent of U.S. email addresses, says that it gives customers "total control over the data we have on you," and allows them to review and edit the categories (like "estimated household income" and "Likely Political Contributor to Republicans") that RapLeaf has connected with their email addresses.
How do I know when someone has purchased data about me?
Most of the time, you don't.
When you're checking out at a store and a cashier asks you for your Zip code, the store isn't just getting that single piece of information. Acxiom and other data companies offer services that allow stores to use your Zip code and the name on your credit card to pinpoint your home address — without asking you for it directly.
Is there any way to stop the companies from collecting and sharing information about me?
Yes, but it would require a whole lot of work.
Many data brokers offer consumers the chance to "opt out" of being included in their databases, or at least from receiving advertising enabled by that company. Rapleaf, for instance, has a "Permanent opt-out" that "deletes information associated with your email address from the Rapleaf database."
But to actually opt-out effectively, you need to know about all the different data brokers and where to find their opt-outs. Most consumers, of course, don't have that information.
In their privacy report last year, the FTC suggested that data brokers should create a centralized website that would make it easier for consumers to learn about the existence of these companies and their rights regarding the data they collect.
How many people do these companies have information on? Basically everyone in the U.S. and many beyond it. Acxiom, recently profiled by the New York Times, says it has information on 500 million people worldwide, including "nearly every U.S. consumer."
After the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported, Acxiom was able to locate 11 of the 19 hijackers in its database. How is all of this data actually used? Mostly to sell you stuff. Companies want to buy lists of people who might be interested in what they're selling — and also want to learn more about their current customers. They also sell their information for other purposes, including identity verification, fraud prevention and background checks. If new privacy laws are passed, will they include the right to see what data these companies have collected about me?
Unlikely.
In a report on privacy last year, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that Congress pass legislation "that would provide consumers with access to information about them held by a data broker." President Barack Obama has also proposed a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights that would give consumers the right to access and correct certain information about them.
But this probably won't include access to marketing data, which the Federal Trade Commission considers less sensitive than data used for credit reports or identity verification.
In terms of marketing data, "we think at the very least consumers should have access to the general categories of data the companies have about consumers," said Maneesha Mithal of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.
Data companies have also pushed back against the idea of opening up marketing profiles for individual consumers' inspection.
Even if there were errors in your marketing data profile, "the worst thing that could happen is that you get an advertising offer that isn't relevant to you," said Rachel Thomas, the vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.
"The fraud and security risks that you run by opening up those files is higher than any potential harm that could happen to the consumer," Thomas said.
11. Japan's cleanup of radiation, other toxins from tsunami & nuclear fiasco anything but clean
NARAHA, Japan - Two years after the triple calamities of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster ravaged Japan's northeastern Pacific coast, debris containing asbestos, lead, PCBs — and perhaps most worrying — radioactive waste due to the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant looms as a threat for the region.
So far, disposal of debris from the disasters is turning out to have been anything but clean. Workers often lacking property oversight, training or proper equipment have dumped contaminated waste with scant regard for regulations or safety, as organized crime has infiltrated the cleanup process.
Researchers are only beginning to analyze environmental samples for potential health implications from the various toxins swirled in the petri dish of the disaster zone — including dioxins, benzene, cadmium and organic waste-related, said Shoji F. Nakayama of the government-affiliated National Institute for Environmental Studies.
Apart from some inflammatory reactions to some substances in the dust and debris, the longer-term health risks remain unclear, he said.
The mountains of rubble and piles of smashed cars and scooters scattered along the coast only hint at the scale of the debris removed so far from coastlines and river valleys stripped bare by the tsunami. To clear, sort and process the rubble — and a vastly larger amount of radiation-contaminated soil and other debris near the nuclear plant in Fukushima, the government is relying on big construction companies whose multi-layer subcontracting systems are infiltrated by criminal gangs, or yakuza.
In January, police arrested a senior member of Japan's second-largest yakuza group, Sumiyoshi Kai, on suspicion of illegally dispatching three contract workers to Date, a city in Fukushima struggling with relatively high radioactive contamination, through another construction company and pocketing one-third of their pay.
He told interrogators he came up with the plot to "make money out of clean-up projects" because the daily pay for such government projects, at 15,000-17,000 yen ($160-$180), was far higher than for other construction jobs, said police spokesman Hiraku Hasumi.
Gangsters have long been involved in industrial waste handling, and police say they suspect gangsters are systematically targeting reconstruction projects, swindling money from low-interest lending schemes for disaster-hit residents and illegally mobilizing construction and clean-up workers.
Meanwhile, workers complain of docked pay, unpaid hazard allowances — which should be 10,000 yen, or $110, a day — and of inadequate safety equipment and training for handling the hazardous waste they are clearing from towns, shores and forests after meltdowns of three nuclear plant reactor cores at Fukushima Dai-Ichi released radiation into the surrounding air, soil and ocean.
"We are only part of a widespread problem," said a 56-year-old cleanup worker, who asked to be identified only by his last name, Nakamura, out of fear of retaliation. "Everyone, from bureaucrats to construction giants to tattooed gangsters, is trying to prey on decontamination projects. And the government is looking the other way."
During a recent visit to Naraha, a deserted town of 8,000 that is now a weedy no-man's land within the 20-kilometre (12-mile) restricted zone around the crippled nuclear plant, workers wearing regular work clothes and surgical masks were scraping away topsoil, chopping tree branches and washing down roofs.
"They told me only how to cut grass, but nothing about radiation," said Munenori Kagaya, 59, who worked in the nearby town of Tomioka, which is off-limits due to high radiation.
Naraha's mayor, Yukiei Matsumoto, said that early on, he and other local officials were worried over improper handling of the 1.5 trillion yen ($16 billion) cleanup, but refrained from raising the issue, until public allegations of dozens of instances of mishandling of radioactive waste prompted an investigation by the Environment Ministry, which is handling decontamination of the 11 worst-affected towns and villages.
"I want them to remind them again what the cleanup is for," Matsumoto said in an interview. "Its purpose is to improve the environment so that people can safely return to live here. It's not just to meet a deadline and get it over with."
The ministry said it found only five questionable cases, though it acknowledged a need for better oversight. Another probe, by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry found rampant labour violations — inadequate education and protection from radiation exposure, a lack of medical checks and unpaid salaries and hazard pay — at nearly half the cleanup operations in Fukushima.
About half of the 242 contractors involved were reprimanded for violations, the ministry said.
An Environment Ministry official in charge of decontamination said the government has little choice but to rely on big contractors, and to give them enough leeway to get the work done.
"We have to admit that only the major construction companies have the technology and manpower to do such large-scale government projects," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue. "If cleanup projects are overseen too strictly, it will most likely cause further delays and labour shortages."
Minoru Hara, deputy manager at a temporary waste storage site in Naraha, defended the 3,000 workers doing the work — the only people allowed to stay in the town.
"Most of the cleanup workers are working sincerely and hard," Hara said. "They are doing a good job of washing down houses and cleaning up gardens. Such criticism is really unfair, and bad for morale."
Labour shortages, lax oversight and massive amounts of funds budgeted for the clean-up are a recipe for cheating. And plenty of money is at stake: the cleanup of a 20-kilometre (12-mile) segment of an expressway whose worst contamination exceeds allowable radiation limits by 10 times will cost 2.1 billion yen ($22.5 billion), said Yoshinari Yoshida, an Environment Ministry official.
"While decontamination is a must, the government is bearing the burden. We have to consider the cost factor," said deputy Environment Minister Shinji Inoue as he watched workers pressure wash the road's surface, a process Yoshida said was expected to reduce contamination by half.
The cleanup is bound to overrun its budget by several times, as delays deepen due to a lack of long-term storage options as opposition among local residents in many areas hardens. It will leave Fukushima, whose huge farm and fisheries industry has been walloped by radiation fears, with 31 million tons of nuclear waste or more. Around Naraha, huge temporary dumps of radioactive waste, many football fields in size and stacked two huge bags deep, are scattered around the disaster zone
The cleanups extend beyond Fukushima, to Iwate in the north and Chiba, which neighbours Tokyo, in the south. And the concerns are not limited to radiation. A walk through areas in Miyagi and Iwate that already were cleared of debris finds plenty of toxic detritus, such as batteries from cellphones, electrical wiring, plastic piping and gas canisters.
Japan has the technology to safely burn up most toxins at very high temperatures, with minimal emissions of PCBs, mercury and other poisons. But mounds of wood chips in a seaside processing area near Kesennuma were emitting smoke into the air one recent winter afternoon, possibly from spontaneous combustion.
Workers at that site had high-grade gas masks, an improvement from the early days, when many working in the disaster zone had only surgical masks, at most, to protect them from contaminated dust and smoke.
Overall, how well the debris and contaminants are being handled depends largely on the location.
Sendai, the biggest city in the region, sorted debris as it was collected and sealed the surfaces of areas used to store debris for processing to protect the groundwater, thanks to technical advice from its sister-city Kyoto, home to many experts who advised the government in its cleanup of the 1995 earthquake in the Kobe-Osaka area that killed more than 6,400 people.
But Ishinomaki, a city of more than 160,000, collected its debris first and is only gradually sorting and processing it, said the U.S.-educated Nakayama, who worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before returning to Japan.
"There were no technical experts there for the waste management side," he said. "They did some good work with chemical monitoring but in total, risk assessment, risk management, unfortunately they did not have that expertise."
Ultimately, just as they are choosing to live with contamination from chemicals and other toxins, the authorities may have to reconsider their determination to completely clean up the radiation, given the effort's cost and limited effectiveness, experts say.
Regarding the nuclear accident, "there has been so much emphasis on decontamination that no other options were considered," said Hiroshi Suzuki, a professor emeritus at Tohoku University in Sendai and chairman of the Fukushima Prefectural Reconstruction Committee.
Some places, such as playgrounds, obviously must be cleaned up. But others, such as forests, should just be left alone, since gathering or burning radioactive materials concentrates them — the opposite of what is needed since the more diluted they are, the better.
To a certain extent, policy is being dictated by politics, said Suzuki.
Before the accident, residents believed they were completely safe, he said. "The authorities want to be able to tell them once again that the area is safe. To do this they need to return it to the state that it was in before the accident."
Naraha resident Yoshimasa Murakami, a 79-year-old farmer, said he has low expectations.
A month after the government started cleaning his spacious home he has not seen a major decrease in radiation, he said while sitting on a balcony overlooking his traditional Japanese garden.
He set a dosimeter on the grass. It measured radiation nearly five times the target level and almost the same as the 1.09 microsieverts per hour found when officials surveyed it in December.
Murakami had come to the house for the day. He, his wife and daughter now live 50 kilometres (30 miles) away in Koriyama city.
He visits a few times a week to keep an eye on the cleanup workers. At nearly 80, Murakami says he doesn't mind about the radiation, but his wife does. And if he returns, his other relatives and grandchildren will be afraid to visit.
"Then, what's the point?" he said.
"I don't think decontamination is going to work," Murakami said. "The nuclear crisis is not fully over, and you never know, something still can go wrong."
12. Pentagon's new massive expansion of 'cyber-security' unit is about everything except defense Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the public-private National Security State
Glenn Greenwald
As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning announces "a major expansion of [the Pentagon's] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold." Specifically, says the New York Times this morning, "the expansion would increase the Defense Department's Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900." The Post describes this expansion as "part of an effort to turn an organization that has focused largely on defensive measures into the equivalent of an Internet-era fighting force." This Cyber Command Unit operates under the command of Gen. Keith Alexander, who also happens to be the head of the National Security Agency, the highly secretive government network that spies on the communications of foreign nationals - and American citizens.
The Pentagon's rhetorical justification for this expansion is deeply misleading. Beyond that, these activities pose a wide array of serious threats to internet freedom, privacy, and international law that, as usual, will be conducted with full-scale secrecy and with little to no oversight and accountability. And, as always, there is a small army of private-sector corporations who will benefit most from this expansion.
Disguising aggression as "defense"
Let's begin with the way this so-called "cyber-security" expansion has been marketed. It is part of a sustained campaign which, quite typically, relies on blatant fear-mongering.
In March, 2010, the Washington Post published an amazing Op-Ed by Adm. Michael McConnell, Bush's former Director of National Intelligence and a past and current executive with Booz Allen, a firm representing numerous corporate contractors which profit enormously each time the government expands its "cyber-security" activities. McConnell's career over the last two decades - both at Booz, Allen and inside the government - has been devoted to accelerating the merger between the government and private sector in all intelligence, surveillance and national security matters (it was he who led the successful campaign to retroactively immunize the telecom giants for their participation in the illegal NSA domestic spying program). Privatizing government cyber-spying and cyber-warfare is his primary focus now.
McConnell's Op-Ed was as alarmist and hysterical as possible. Claiming that "the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing", it warned that "chaos would result" from an enemy cyber-attack on US financial systems and that "our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well." Based on these threats, McConnell advocated that "we" - meaning "the government and the private sector" - "need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace" and that "we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment - who did it, from where, why and what was the result - more manageable." As Wired's Ryan Singel wrote: "He's talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation."
The same week the Post published McConnell's extraordinary Op-Ed, the Obama White House issued its own fear-mongering decree on cyber-threats, depicting the US as a vulnerable victim to cyber-aggression. It began with this sentence: "President Obama has identified cybersecurity as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counter." It announced that "the Executive Branch was directed to work closely with all key players in US cybersecurity, including state and local governments and the private sector" and to "strengthen public/private partnerships", and specifically announced Obama's intent to "to implement the recommendations of the Cyberspace Policy Review built on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) launched by President George W. Bush."
Since then, the fear-mongering rhetoric from government officials has relentlessly intensified, all devoted to scaring citizens into believing that the US is at serious risk of cataclysmic cyber-attacks from "aggressors". This all culminated when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, last October, warned of what he called a "cyber-Pearl Harbor". This "would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability." Identifying China, Iran, and terrorist groups, he outlined a parade of horribles scarier than anything since Condoleezza Rice's 2002 Iraqi "mushroom cloud":
"An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches. They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country."
As usual, though, reality is exactly the opposite. This massive new expenditure of money is not primarily devoted to defending against cyber-aggressors. The US itself is the world's leading cyber-aggressor. A major purpose of this expansion is to strengthen the US's ability to destroy other nations with cyber-attacks. Indeed, even the Post report notes that a major component of this new expansion is to "conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries".
It is the US - not Iran, Russia or "terror" groups - which already is the first nation (in partnership with Israel) to aggressively deploy a highly sophisticated and extremely dangerous cyber-attack. Last June, the New York Times' David Sanger reported what most of the world had already suspected: "From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons." In fact, Obama "decided to accelerate the attacks . . . even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet." According to the Sanger's report, Obama himself understood the significance of the US decision to be the first to use serious and aggressive cyber-warfare:
"Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons - even under the most careful and limited circumstances - could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks."
The US isn't the vulnerable victim of cyber-attacks. It's the leading perpetrator of those attacks. As Columbia Professor and cyber expert Misha Glenny wrote in the NYT last June: Obama's cyber-attack on Iran "marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet."
Indeed, exactly as Obama knew would happen, revelations that it was the US which became the first country to use cyber-warfare against a sovereign country - just as it was the first to use the atomic bomb and then drones - would make it impossible for it to claim with any credibility (except among its own media and foreign policy community) that it was in a defensive posture when it came to cyber-warfare. As Professor Glenny wrote: "by introducing such pernicious viruses as Stuxnet and Flame, America has severely undermined its moral and political credibility." That's why, as the Post reported yesterday, the DOJ is engaged in such a frantic and invasive effort to root out Sanger's source: because it reveals the obvious truth that the US is the leading aggressor in the world when it comes to cyber-weapons.
This significant expansion under the Orwellian rubric of "cyber-security" is thus a perfect microcosm of US military spending generally. It's all justified under by the claim that the US must defend itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact opposite: the new program is devoted to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to the rest of the world. It's the same way the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of developing defenses against such weapons (such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says came from a US Army lab). It's how the US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more arms and bombs more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined.
Threats to privacy and internet freedom
Beyond the aggressive threat to other nations posed by the Pentagon's "cyber-security" programs, there is the profound threat to privacy, internet freedom, and the ability to communicate freely for US citizens and foreign nationals alike. The US government has long viewed these "cyber-security" programs as a means of monitoring and controlling the internet and disseminating propaganda. The fact that this is all being done under the auspices of the NSA and the Pentagon means, by definition, that there will be no transparency and no meaningful oversight.
Back in 2003, the Rumsfeld Pentagon prepared a secret report entitled "Information Operations (IO) Roadmap", which laid the foundation for this new cyber-warfare expansion. The Pentagon's self-described objective was "transforming IO into a core military competency on par with air, ground, maritime and special operations". In other words, its key objective was to ensure military control over internet-based communications:
It further identified superiority in cyber-attack capabilities as a vital military goal in PSYOPs (Psychological Operations) and "information-centric fights":
And it set forth the urgency of dominating the "IO battlespace" not only during wartime but also in peacetime:
As a 2006 BBC report on this Pentagon document noted: "Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans." And while the report paid lip service to the need to create "boundaries" for these new IO military activities, "they don't seem to explain how." Regarding the report's plan to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum", the BBC noted: "Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet."
Since then, there have been countless reports of the exploitation by the US national security state to destroy privacy and undermine internet freedom. In November, the LA Times described programs that "teach students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage." They "also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives." The program, needless to say, "has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security."
In 2010, Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, gave a speech explicitly announcing that the US intends to abandon its policy of "leaving the Internet alone". Noting that this "has been the nation's Internet policy since the Internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s", he decreed: "This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now."
The documented power of the US government to monitor and surveil internet communications is already unfathomably massive. Recall that the Washington Post's 2010 "Top Secret America" series noted that: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." And the Obama administration has formally demanded that it have access to any and all forms of internet communication.
It is hard to overstate the danger to privacy and internet freedom from a massive expansion of the National Security State's efforts to exploit and control the internet. As Wired's Singel wrote back in 2010:
"Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race".
Wildly exaggerated cyber-threats are the pretext for this control, the "mushroom cloud" and the Tonkin Gulf fiction of cyber-warfare. As Singel aptly put it: "the only war going on is one for the soul of the internet." That's the vital context for understanding this massive expansion of Pentagon and NSA consolidated control over cyber programs.
Bonanza for private contractors
As always, it is not just political power but also private-sector profit driving this expansion. As military contracts for conventional war-fighting are modestly reduced, something needs to replace it, and these large-scale "cyber-security" contracts are more than adequate. Virtually every cyber-security program from the government is carried out in conjunction with its "private-sector partners", who receive large transfers of public funds for this work.
Two weeks ago, Business Week reported that "Lockheed Martin Corp., AT&T Inc., and CenturyLink Inc. are the first companies to sign up for a US program giving them classified information on cyber threats that they can package as security services for sale to other companies." This is part of a government effort "to create a market based on classified US information about cyber threats." In May, it was announced that "the Pentagon is expanding and making permanent a trial program that teams the government with Internet service providers to protect defense firms' computer networks against data theft by foreign adversaries" - all as "part of a larger effort to broaden the sharing of classified and unclassified cyberthreat data between the government and industry."
Indeed, there is a large organization of defense and intelligence contractors devoted to one goal: expanding the private-public merger for national security and intelligence functions. This organization - the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) - was formerly headed by Adm. McConnell, and describes itself as a "collaboration by leaders from throughout the US Intelligence Community" which "combines the experience of senior leaders from government, the private sector, and academia."
As I detailed back in 2010, one of its primary goals is to scare the nation about supposed cyber-threats in order to justify massive new expenditures for the private-sector intelligence industry on cyber-security measures and vastly expanded control over the internet. Indeed, in his 2010 Op-Ed, Adm. McConnell expressly acknowledged that the growing privatization of internet cyber-security programs "will muddy the waters between the traditional roles of the government and the private sector." At the very same time McConnell published this Op-Ed, the INSA website featured a report entitled "Addressing Cyber Security Through Public-Private Partnership." It featured a genuinely creepy graphic showing the inter-connectedness between government institutions (such as Congress and regulatory agencies), the Surveillance State, private intelligence corporations, and the Internet:
Private-sector profit is now inextricably linked with the fear-mongering campaign over cyber-threats. At one INSA conference in 2009 - entitled "Cyber Deterrence Conference" - government officials and intelligence industry executives gathered together to stress that "government and private sector actors should emphasize collaboration and partnership through the creation of a model that assigns specific roles and responsibilities."
As intelligence contractor expert Tim Shorrock told Democracy Now when McConnell - then at Booz Allen - was first nominated to be DNI:
Well, the NSA, the National Security Agency, is really sort of the lead agency in terms of outsourcing . . . . Booz Allen is one of about, you know, ten large corporations that play a very major role in American intelligence. Every time you hear about intelligence watching North Korea or tapping al-Qaeda phones, something like that, you can bet that corporations like these are very heavily involved. And Booz Allen is one of the largest of these contractors. I estimate that about 50% of our $45 billion intelligence budget goes to private sector contractors like Booz Allen.
This public-private merger for intelligence and surveillance functions not only vests these industries with large-scale profits at public expense, but also the accompanying power that was traditionally reserved for government. And unlike government agencies, which are at least subjected in theory to some minimal regulatory oversight, these private-sector actors have virtually none, even as their surveillance and intelligence functions rapidly increase.
What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies - Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam's chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs - has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.
Like all of these wildly exaggerated cartoon menaces, there is some degree of threat posed by cyber-attacks. But, as Singel described, all of this can be managed with greater security systems for public and private computer networks - just as some modest security measures are sufficient to deal with the terrorist threat.
This new massive expansion has little to do with any actual cyber-threat - just as the invasion of Iraq and global assassination program have little to do with actual terrorist threats. It is instead all about strengthening the US's offensive cyber-war capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and ensuring further transfers of massive public wealth to private industry continue unabated. In other words, it perfectly follows the template used by the public-private US National Security State over the last six decades to entrench and enrich itself based on pure pretext.
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http://www.blogtalkradio.com/newmercurymedia/2013/03/10/pnn--the-foreclosure-foursome
http://alturl.com/ryqds
Renee Shaker Author Confessions of a Reaganite
Ron Gillis
Susan Howai
Sylvia Landis
Code Pink Media - Medea Benjamin produced by Journalist and Independent Producer Stephen Malagodi
==================================================================
Listen to the Show [Listen]
ForeClosure Resources
www.NakedCapitalism.com
www.rongillis4staterep75.com
www.stopbrowardforeclosures.blogspot.com/
MORE FORECLOSURE RESOURCES
Bankers Destroyed Documents
Foreclosure Discrepancy Statistics
"And
if that wasn’t bad enough, those figures came from a housing data firm,
RealtyTrac, which reported Palm Beach County’s October 2012 foreclosure
starts at 925 while the Palm Beach County Clerk of Court reports a much
more larger figure, 1,418 new October 2012 foreclosures. This is 493
or 35% more than what RealtyTrac is reporting and that’s just in Palm
Beach County."
Reuters and robosigning continuing
Submission of fraudulent records at the county level continues-Reuters
Email: TampsforeclosureGal@gmail.com
Florida House Bill: 87 - Speeds Up Foreclosure
Senate Bill 1666 - Speeds Up Foreclosure
Oppose the Bill
==================================================================
Events
Join US for COMMON SENSE at the SQUARE: An event to raise awareness and explore ways to promote Common Sense Gun Legislation
Thursday, March 21, 2013 4:30-6:30pm
Sanborn Square 72 N. Federal Highway
Boca Raton, FL 33432
State Legislative Action Alert!!!
House Floor Vote Expected This Week On Precourt Bill HB 655
Last Week, the State Affairs Committee passed the Precourt bill HB 655on party lines. It will go to the Rules Committee on Tuesday, March 12. The Rules Committee sets the calendar for Floor votes. The Rules Committee has to give a 48 hour notice for a Floor vote to occur. If the Rules Committee sets the calendar for a Floor vote on the Precourt bill on Tuesday, a final House Floor could take place on Thursday, March 14. The Precourt bill strips the home rule of local governments by restricting county level ordinances like our Miami-Dade Living Wage Ordinance, Wage Theft Ordinance and Domestic Violence Ordinance as well as for future Ordinances like Earned Sick Days.
Please contact by phone and e-mail every House member of the Miami-Dade Legislative Delegation and tell them to VOTE NO on HB 655. Tell them that local governments should NOT be stripped of their right to provide economic security for Miami-Dade’s working families.
Frank Artiles (R) – HD 118 – 850-717-5118 Frank.artiles@myfloridahouse.gov
Michael Bileca (R) – HD-115 – 850-717-5115 Michael.bileca@myfloridahouse.gov
Daphne Campbell (D) – HD-108 – 8850-717-5108 Daphne.campbell@myfloridahouse.gov
Jose Felix Diaz (R) – HD -116 – 850-717-5116 Jose.diaz@myfloridahouse.gov
Eddy Gonzalez (R) – HD-111 – 850-717-5111 eddy.gonzalez@myfloridahouse.gov
Kionne McGhee (D) – HD-117 – 850-717-5117 Kionne.mcghee@myfloridahouse.gov
Jeanette Nunez (R) – HD- 119 – 850-717-5119 Jeanette.nunez@myfloridahouse.gov
Jose Oliva (R) – HD-110 – 850-717-5110 Jose.oliva@myfloridahouse.gov
Sharon Pritchett (D) – HD-102 – 850-717-5102 Sharon.pritchett@myfloridahouse.gov
Jose Javier Rodriguez (D) – HD-112 – 850-717-5112 Jose.rodriguez@myfloriahouse.gov
Cynthia Stafford (D) – HD-109 – 850-717-5112 Cynthia.stafford@myfloridahouse.gov
Carlos Trujillo (R) – HD-105 – 850-717-5105 Carlos.trujillo@myfloridahouse.gov
Barbara Watson (D) – HD-107 – 850-717-5107 Barbara.watson@myfloridahouse.gov
Kit Rafferty
Executive Director
South Florida Jobs with Justice
1671 NW 16th Terrace
Miami, FL 33125
Phone: 305.324.1107 Fax:305.324.1119
Cell: 305.987.5251
The next scheduled meeting of the Democratic Club of Saint Lucie County
will take place on March13 at 7pm in Kings Plaza's IBEW Union Local 627 hall, 7652 S US Highway One, just South of Prima Vista. - DCSLC Regular Meeting Agenda - March 13, 2013
Monday March 11, 7:30-9 p.m. Public Lecture
Harry Targ, Professor of Political Science, Purdue University. The Empire in Disarray: Global Challenges to United States Power From Harry Truman to Barack Obama
The United States emerged from World War II as the "hegemonic" power in the international system. By virtue of its economic, political, and military strength, it fashioned a world based upon institutions which maximized opportunities for trade, investment, financial speculation, and economic development while maintaining military superiority. Over the subsequent sixty years, and responses to an increasingly resistant world, U.S. capacity to shape international relations has declined.
This presentation will briefly describe the "golden age" of United States power and the increasing resistance to it. It will concentrate on how the foreign policy of Barack Obama has responded to a more complicated world during his first term which can be characterized as wavering between an effort to restore U.S. hegemony versus "pragmatically" adjusting to the 21st century world of diversified power and influence. The current debate about drone warfare reflects this contradiction. Finally, the presentation will suggest ways in which the peace movement might encourage a more pragmatic foreign policy in the future.
Harry Targ received his Ph. D from Northwestern University in 1967 and has been teaching and writing at Purdue University ever since. His teaching and research interests include international political economy, foreign policy, Central America and the Caribbean, labor and politics, and U.S. and global social movements. He has published twelve books on foreign policy, Cuba and Central America, the impacts of plant closings, and collections of essays on international political economy, culture and politics, and American politics. His most recent book, Diary of a Heartland Radical (Changemaker, 2011) consists of a collection of over 100 blog essays from www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com.
He has been an activist in peace and justice organizations, the labor movement, and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism for many years.
Vizcaya Clubhouse
15150 Michelangelo Blvd
Delray Beach
Tell the gatekeeper that you're going to the Clubhouse program.
- - - - - - -
Monday March 11, Tuesday March 12, Wednesday March 13
Florida Atlantic University, Peace Studies Program
Public Lectures: Claude AnShin Thomas, Vietnam War veteran, Buddhist monk, international speaker, teacher, writer, and non-violent advocate.
Monday March 11, 4-5:30 p.m. FAU Jupiter, AD 119 (Auditorium)
At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace
Tuesday, March 12, 7-9 p.m. FAU Boca, AL 189
The Roots of War, The Seeds of Peace
Public Lecture: Dr. Brian Shoup, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Mississippi State University.
Wednesday, March 13, 6:30-8 p. m. FAU Boca Raton, PA 101
Democratization and State-Building in Post-Conflict Societies
FAU’s Peace Studies Program, established in 1999 within the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, has brought together students, faculty, and community members to explore pathways to peace and the process of peace-building. As an interdisciplinary program, Peace Studies draws from a broad range of fields: anthropology, literary studies, political science, communication, history, ethics, social work and more to offer an undergraduate certificate designed to complement a traditional major in any field. The FAU Peace Studies Program sponsors speakers specializing in peace-studies-related issues, free and open to the public thanks to the generosity of the Chastain-Johnson Fund and the Schmidt Family Foundation.
www.fau.edu/peacestudies
Facebook (Peace Studies and Peace Studies Student Association [PSSA])
Prof. Doug McGetchin, Director of FAU Peace Studies dmcgetch@fau.edu or 561-799-8226
ADA (Americans with Disability Act) Statement: If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate fully, please contact Prof. McGetchin by email (above), phone (above) or TTY Relay station 18009558770. Please make your needs known as soon as possible to allow time for effective accommodations, preferably by four business days prior to the event.
- - - - - - -
Tuesday March 12, 7-9 p.m. Lecture, Discussion, Raised Voices
Harry Targ, Professor of Political Science, Purdue University.The Influence of Marxist Ideas on the Performance and Politics of Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger
Professor Targ has teaching and research interests in U.S. and international political economy, U.S. foreign policy, organized labor and class struggle, plant closings and unemployment, and U.S. foreign policy in Central America. He has authored International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle; Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II; and co-authored Plant Closings: International Context and Social Costs. His book, Cuba and the United States: A New World Order? was published in 1992. A co-edited volume, Marxism Today, was published in 1996. Also, he has co-authored children's books on Guatemala and Honduras. More recently he has published Challenging Late Capitalism, Neoliberal Globalization and Militarism; and Diary of a Heartland Radical.
Then, join PinkSlip and Solidarity Singers in singing a couple of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs that Targ references in his lecture.
HOSTED BY BOB & PATTY BENDER AND JOAN FRIEDENBERG & MARK SCHNEIDER
At the home of Joan Friedenberg and Mark Schneider
5165 Palazzo Place
Boynton Beach
In Tuscany Bay, off Military between Woolbright and Flavor Pict
RSVP (required for gate) by Sunday March 10th 561-752-0946
Light refreshments will be served.
- - - - - - -
Saturday March 16, 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. All Peoples’ Diversity Day
Fourth Annual Diversity Festival, free of charge!
In 2060 European Americans will not be dominant in our society. It’s no longer just a nice thing to connect with people who are different; it’s a necessity if we are going to live in peace and harmony.
Why an arts festival? The arts touch people’s hearts. Starting at 11 am, dazzling performances of dance, music and social theater spanning the globe will commence on the stage at 15-minute intervals. Over forty interactive, merchandise and food booths will provide wonderful things to see and do for the whole family.
To sign-up for free 9:30 to 11:00 am kid’s craft workshop call 561 495-9818.
Pompey Park (indoors)
1101 NW 2nd Street & NW 10th Avenue
Delray Beach
- - - - - - -
Saturday March 16, 10 a.m. Deerfield Progressive Forum
Lynn Appleton, Professor of Sociology, FAU. Reagan-esque Revolution
Activities Center adjacent to LeClub at Deerfield Century Village East. Enter Century Village through the West Gate at West Drive (off Powerline between SW 10th St. and Hillsboro Blvd.). Tell the gatekeeper that you are attending the Forum. Take an immediate left after the gate and then another immediate left. Follow the road around until you come to a "T," then turn left into the parking lot. $5 donation requested.
954-428-1598
www.deerfieldprogressiveforum.org
====================================
1. The Obama Administration’s Latest Anonymous Leaks Aim to Justify Drone Killings of US Citizens (Updated)
Journalists for the New York Times have published a story that purportedly provides an account of what ultimately led the United States government to target and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric who had been born in the US. It also provides some details on what happened when US citizen Samir Khan and Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki were killed. However, importantly, the story consists primarily of “anonymous assertions” by “current and former Obama administration officials.”
…In anonymous assertions to The New York Times, current and former Obama administration officials seek to justify the killings of three U.S. citizens even as the administration fights hard to prevent any transparency or accountability for those killings in court. This is the latest in a series of one-sided, selective disclosures that prevent meaningful public debate and legal or even political accountability for the government’s killing program, including its use against citizens…
Though the introduction claims the story “highlights the perils of a war conducted behind a classified veil, relying on missile strikes rarely acknowledged by the American government and complex legal justifications drafted for only a small group of officials to read,” the Times essentially provides a forum for government officials to explain their side of the story and defend the decisions that were made in the process of killing an American without charge or trial.
It is insidious because, as the ACLU and CCR appropriately points out, “Government officials have made serious allegations against Anwar al-Awlaki, but allegations are not evidence, and the whole point of the Constitution’s due process clause is that a court must distinguish between the two. If the government has evidence that Al-Awlaki posed an imminent threat at the time it killed him, it should present that evidence to a court.”
Now, officials “anonymously assert that Samir Khan’s killing was unintended and that the killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi was a mistake, even though in court filings the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge any role in those killings. In court filings made just last week, the government in essence argued, wrongly, that it has the authority to kill these three Americans without ever having to justify its actions under the Constitution in any courtroom.”
The secrecy game being played by the Obama administration is a blatant abuse of power, and this story published by the Times only serves to further enable such game-playing.
Reporters write, “While the Constitution generally requires judicial process before the government may kill an American, the Supreme Court has held that in some contexts — like when the police, in order to protect innocent bystanders, ram a car to stop a high-speed chase — no prior permission from a judge is necessary; the lawyers concluded that the wartime threat posed by Mr. Awlaki qualified as such a context, and so his constitutional rights did not bar the government from killing him without a trial.”
The only problem is it should not be up to officials in the Executive Branch to decide when citizens do not deserve to enjoy the continued protection or privilege of constitutional rights. Courts are the only arena capable of determining a person no longer deserves judicial process. As such, the government should have to fully cooperate with a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and CCR that challenges the legality of the drone strike that killed Al-Awlaki and Khan, “as well as the separate strike that killed Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, in Yemen in September and October 2011.” It should be required to prove these deaths were not wrongful before a person like a judge.
The story continues and describes Office of Legal Counsel lawyers working for the Justice Department who “grew uneasy.” [cont'd.]
Journalists for the New York Times have published a story that purportedly provides an account of what ultimately led the United States government to target and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric who had been born in the US. It also provides some details on what happened when US citizen Samir Khan and Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki were killed. However, importantly, the story consists primarily of “anonymous assertions” by “current and former Obama administration officials.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have condemned the story:
…In anonymous assertions to The New York Times, current and former Obama administration officials seek to justify the killings of three U.S. citizens even as the administration fights hard to prevent any transparency or accountability for those killings in court. This is the latest in a series of one-sided, selective disclosures that prevent meaningful public debate and legal or even political accountability for the government’s killing program, including its use against citizens…
Though the introduction claims the story “highlights the perils of a war conducted behind a classified veil, relying on missile strikes rarely acknowledged by the American government and complex legal justifications drafted for only a small group of officials to read,” the Times essentially provides a forum for government officials to explain their side of the story and defend the decisions that were made in the process of killing an American without charge or trial.
It is insidious because, as the ACLU and CCR appropriately points out, “Government officials have made serious allegations against Anwar al-Awlaki, but allegations are not evidence, and the whole point of the Constitution’s due process clause is that a court must distinguish between the two. If the government has evidence that Al-Awlaki posed an imminent threat at the time it killed him, it should present that evidence to a court.”
Now, officials “anonymously assert that Samir Khan’s killing was unintended and that the killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi was a mistake, even though in court filings the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge any role in those killings. In court filings made just last week, the government in essence argued, wrongly, that it has the authority to kill these three Americans without ever having to justify its actions under the Constitution in any courtroom.”
The secrecy game being played by the Obama administration is a blatant abuse of power, and this storypublished by the Times only serves to further enable such game-playing.
Reporters write, “While the Constitution generally requires judicial process before the government may kill an American, the Supreme Court has held that in some contexts — like when the police, in order to protect innocent bystanders, ram a car to stop a high-speed chase — no prior permission from a judge is necessary; the lawyers concluded that the wartime threat posed by Mr. Awlaki qualified as such a context, and so his constitutional rights did not bar the government from killing him without a trial.”
The only problem is it should not be up to officials in the Executive Branch to decide when citizens do not deserve to enjoy the continued protection or privilege of constitutional rights. Courts are the only arena capable of determining a person no longer deserves judicial process. As such, the government should have to fully cooperate with a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and CCR that challenges the legality of the drone strike that killed Al-Awlaki and Khan, “as well as the separate strike that killed Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, in Yemen in September and October 2011.” It should be required to prove these deaths were not wrongful before a person like a judge.
The story continues and describes Office of Legal Counsel lawyers working for the Justice Department who “grew uneasy.”
…They told colleagues there were issues they had not adequately addressed, particularly after reading a legal blog that focused on a statute that bars Americans from killing other Americans overseas. In light of the gravity of the question and with more time, they began drafting a second, more comprehensive memo, expanding and refining their legal analysis and, in an unusual step, researching and citing dense thickets of intelligence reports supporting the premise that Mr. Awlaki was plotting attacks…
There is not much explanation for what makes it “unusual” to look at “intelligence reports” on Awlaki while putting together the legal justification for killing him, but one can imagine. Think about lawyers sitting around to craft the legal justification for going to war in Iraq (provided this happened) and contemplate how lawyers would feel pressured to give a favorable analysis that endorsed going to war if they saw the bogus or fabricated reports that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, viewing intelligence reports increases the likelihood the legal analysis produced is less sober and more in favor of whatever objective the administration wanted to achieve when it ordered up the analysis.
Then, there’s the part about how the reporters share how the two OLC lawyers—David Barron and Marty Lederman—”discovered a 1997 district court decision involving a woman who was charged with killing her child in Japan. A judge ruled that the terse overseas-killing law must be interpreted as incorporating the exceptions of its domestic-murder counterpart, writing, ‘Congress did not intend to criminalize justifiable or excusable killings.’”
It’s hard to follow this because it seems like there would be no justification for a mother killing her child. Apparently, they scoured all cases on unlawful killings and found that a judge had made this finding. They pulled it out to conclude, “When the government kills an enemy leader in war or national self-defense…the foreign-killing statute would not impede a strike.”
If that does not seem obscene, the reporters draw this conclusion, “They had not resorted to the Bush-style theories they had once denounced of sweeping presidential war powers to disregard Congressionally imposed limitations.” How so? It seems pretty medieval of the president to be claiming the authority to kill US citizens without charge or trial if they are “wartime enemies” simply on the basis that some judge made a statement in a case where a mother murdered her child.
In any case, there is further manipulation. The ACLU has sought “disclosure of the legal memoranda written by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel that provided justifications for the targeted killing of Al-Aulaqi, as well as records describing the factual basis for the killings of all three Americans, in a separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.” The Times fails to mention this case is ongoing.
The administration arguably used the newspaper back in June when officials spoke anonymously to the Times about the administration’s “kill list.” It has more or less regularly made statements to the press about drone programs—one controlled by the CIA, which the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge in court. (ProPublica documented with a graphic here.)
Leaks or unauthorized disclosures can be good and valuable to understanding national security policies but not when they are made in order to shield documents or records from being released to the public and not when they are made to undermine the pursuit of justice by families of victims of abuses of power.
When leaks occur in these instances, they function as propaganda—making it possible for presidential administration to continue to operate controversial programs in secret without any accountability for actions.
Update
Marcy Wheeler deconstructs the Times‘ story. She writes, “Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, and Scott Shane team up to provide the government’s best case — and at times, an irresponsibly credulous one — for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and the collateral deaths of Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.” She highlights a WikiLeaks cable that is conveniently ignored.
2. DELAYED CLEANUP
Two years after the triple calamities of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster ravaged Japan's northeastern Pacific coast, debris containing asbestos, lead, PCBs - and perhaps most worrying - radioactive waste due to the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant looms as a threat for the region.
So far, disposal of debris from the disasters is turning out to have been anything but clean. Workers often lacking property oversight, training or proper equipment have dumped contaminated waste with scant regard for regulations or safety, as organised crime has infiltrated the cleanup process.
Researchers are only beginning to analyze environmental samples for potential health implications from the various toxins swirled in the petri dish of the disaster zone - including dioxins, benzene, cadmium and organic waste-related, said Shoji F Nakayama of the government-affiliated National Institute for Environmental Studies.
Apart from some inflammatory reactions to some substances in the dust and debris, the longer-term health risks remain unclear, he said.
The mountains of rubble and piles of smashed cars and scooters scattered along the coast only hint at the scale of the debris removed so far from coastlines and river valleys stripped bare by the tsunami.
To clear, sort and process the rubble - and a vastly larger amount of radiation-contaminated soil and other debris near the nuclear plant in Fukushima, the government is relying on big construction companies whose multi-layer subcontracting systems are infiltrated by criminal gangs, or yakuza.
In January, police arrested a senior member of Japan's second-largest yakuza group, Sumiyoshi Kai, on suspicion of illegally dispatching three contract workers to Date, a city in Fukushima struggling with relatively high radioactive contamination, through another construction company and pocketing one-third of their pay.
He told interrogators he came up with the plot to ''make money out of clean-up projects'' because the daily pay for such government projects, at 15,000-17,000 yen, was far higher than for other construction jobs, said police spokesman Hiraku Hasumi.
Gangsters have long been involved in industrial waste handling, and police say they suspect gangsters are systematically targeting reconstruction projects, swindling money from low-interest lending schemes for disaster-hit residents and illegally mobilizing construction and clean-up workers.
Meanwhile, workers complain of docked pay, unpaid hazard allowances - which should be 10,000 yen, a day - and of inadequate safety equipment and training for handling the hazardous waste they are clearing from towns, shores and forests after meltdowns of three nuclear plant reactor cores at Fukushima Dai-Ichi released radiation into the surrounding air, soil and ocean.
''We are only part of a widespread problem,'' said a 56-year-old cleanup worker, who asked to be identified only by his last name, Nakamura, out of fear of retaliation.
''Everyone, from bureaucrats to construction giants to tattooed gangsters, is trying to prey on decontamination projects. And the government is looking the other way.''
During a recent visit to Naraha, a deserted town of 8,000 that is now a weedy no-man's land within the 20-kilometre restricted zone around the crippled nuclear plant, workers wearing regular work clothes and surgical masks were scraping away topsoil, chopping tree branches and washing down roofs.
''They told me only how to cut grass, but nothing about radiation,'' said Munenori Kagaya, 59, who worked in the nearby town of Tomioka, which is off-limits due to high radiation.
Naraha's mayor, Yukiei Matsumoto, said that early on, he and other local officials were worried over improper handling of the 1.5 trillion yen cleanup, but refrained from raising the issue, until public allegations of dozens of instances of mishandling of radioactive waste prompted an investigation by the Environment Ministry, which is handling decontamination of the 11 worst-affected towns and villages.
''I want them to remind them again what the cleanup is for,'' Matsumoto said in an interview. ''Its purpose is to improve the environment so that people can safely return to live here. It's not just to meet a deadline and get it over with.''
The ministry said it found only five questionable cases, though it acknowledged a need for better oversight.
Another probe, by the Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry found rampant labour violations - inadequate education and protection from radiation exposure, a lack of medical checks and unpaid salaries and hazard pay - at nearly half the cleanup operations in Fukushima.
About half of the 242 contractors involved were reprimanded for violations, the ministry said.
An Environment Ministry official in charge of decontamination said the government has little choice but to rely on big contractors, and to give them enough leeway to get the work done.
''We have to admit that only the major construction companies have the technology and manpower to do such large-scale government projects,'' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
''If cleanup projects are overseen too strictly, it will most likely cause further delays and labor shortages.''
Minoru Hara, deputy manager at a temporary waste storage site in Naraha, defended the 3,000 workers doing the work - the only people allowed to stay in the town.
''Most of the cleanup workers are working sincerely and hard,'' Hara said. ''They are doing a good job of washing down houses and cleaning up gardens. Such criticism is really unfair, and bad for morale.''
Labour shortages, lax oversight and massive amounts of funds budgeted for the clean-up are a recipe for cheating. And plenty of money is at stake: the cleanup of a 20-kilometre segment of an expressway whose worst contamination exceeds allowable radiation limits by 10 times will cost 2.1 billion yen, said Yoshinari Yoshida, an Environment Ministry official.
''While decontamination is a must, the government is bearing the burden. We have to consider the cost factor,'' said deputy Environment Minister Shinji Inoue as he watched workers pressure wash the road's surface, a process Yoshida said was expected to reduce contamination by half.
The cleanup is bound to overrun its budget by several times, as delays deepen due to a lack of long-term storage options as opposition among local residents in many areas hardens.
It will leave Fukushima, whose huge farm and fisheries industry has been walloped by radiation fears, with 31 million tons of nuclear waste or more.
Around Naraha, huge temporary dumps of radioactive waste, many football fields in size and stacked two huge bags deep, are scattered around the disaster zone
The cleanups extend beyond Fukushima, to Iwate in the north and Chiba, which neighbours Tokyo, in the south.
And the concerns are not limited to radiation.
A walk through areas in Miyagi and Iwate that already were cleared of debris finds plenty of toxic detritus, such as batteries from cell phones, electrical wiring, plastic piping and gas canisters.
Japan has the technology to safely burn up most toxins at very high temperatures, with minimal emissions of PCBs, mercury and other poisons.
But mounds of wood chips in a seaside processing area near Kesennuma were emitting smoke into the air one recent winter afternoon, possibly from spontaneous combustion.
Workers at that site had high-grade gas masks, an improvement from the early days, when many working in the disaster zone had only surgical masks, at most, to protect them from contaminated dust and smoke.
Overall, how well the debris and contaminants are being handled depends largely on the location.
Sendai, the biggest city in the region, sorted debris as it was collected and sealed the surfaces of areas used to store debris for processing to protect the groundwater, thanks to technical advice from its sister-city Kyoto, home to many experts who advised the government in its cleanup of the 1995 earthquake in the Kobe-Osaka area that killed more than 6,400 people.
But Ishinomaki, a city of more than 160,000, collected its debris first and is only gradually sorting and processing it, said the US-educated Nakayama, who worked for the US Environmental Protection Agency before returning to Japan.
''There were no technical experts there for the waste management side,'' he said.
''They did some good work with chemical monitoring but in total, risk assessment, risk management, unfortunately they did not have that expertise.''
Ultimately, just as they are choosing to live with contamination from chemicals and other toxins, the authorities may have to reconsider their determination to completely clean up the radiation, given the effort's cost and limited effectiveness, experts say.
Regarding the nuclear accident, ''there has been so much emphasis on decontamination that no other options were considered,'' said Hiroshi Suzuki, a professor emeritus at Tohoku University in Sendai and chairman of the Fukushima Prefectural Reconstruction Committee.
Some places, such as playgrounds, obviously must be cleaned up.
But others, such as forests, should just be left alone, since gathering or burning radioactive materials concentrates them - the opposite of what is needed since the more diluted they are, the better.
To a certain extent, policy is being dictated by politics, said Suzuki. Before the accident, residents believed they were completely safe, he said.
''The authorities want to be able to tell them once again that the area is safe. To do this they need to return it to the state that it was in before the accident.'' Naraha resident Yoshimasa Murakami, a 79-year-old farmer, said he has low expectations.
A month after the government started cleaning his spacious home he has not seen a major decrease in radiation, he said while sitting on a balcony overlooking his traditional Japanese garden.
He set a dosimeter on the grass. It measured radiation nearly five times the target level and almost the same as the 1.09 microsieverts per hour found when officials surveyed it in December.
Murakami had come to the house for the day.
He, his wife and daughter now live 50 kilometres away in Koriyama city. He visits a few times a week to keep an eye on the cleanup workers.
At nearly 80, Murakami says he doesn't mind about the radiation, but his wife does.
And if he returns, his other relatives and grandchildren will be afraid to visit.
''Then, what's the point?'' he said. ''I don't think decontamination is going to work,'' Murakami said.
''The nuclear crisis is not fully over, and you never know, something still can go wrong.''
3. Afghan leader alleges US & Taliban are colluding
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday accused the Taliban and the U.S. of working in concert to convince Afghans that violence will worsen if most foreign troops leave — an allegation the top American commander in Afghanistan rejected as "categorically false."
Karzai said two suicide bombings that killed 19 people on Saturday — one outside the Afghan Defense Ministry and the other near a police checkpoint in eastern Khost province — show the insurgent group is conducting attacks to demonstrate that international forces will still be needed to keep the peace after their current combat mission ends in 2014.
"The explosions in Kabul and Khost yesterday showed that they are at the service of America and at the service of this phrase: 2014. They are trying to frighten us into thinking that if the foreigners are not in Afghanistan, we would be facing these sorts of incidents," he said during a nationally televised speech about the state of Afghan women.
Karzai is known for making incendiary comments in his public speeches, a tactic that is often attributed to him trying to appeal to Taliban sympathizers or to gain leverage when he feels his international allies are ignoring his country's sovereignty. In previous speeches, he has threatened to join the Taliban and called his NATO allies occupiers who want to plunder Afghanistan's resources.
U.S. and NATO forces commander Gen. Joseph Dunford said Karzai had never expressed such views to him, but said it was understandable that tensions would arise as the coalition balances the need to complete its mission and the Afghans' move to exercise more sovereignty.
"We have fought too hard over the past 12 years, we have shed too much blood over the last 12 years, to ever think that violence or instability would be to our advantage," Dunford said.
The Karzai government's latest comments and actions come during U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's first visit to Afghanistan since becoming the Pentagon chief, a trip made in part to meet with Karzai. Hours after Karzai's speech, their joint news conference was canceled by officials citing security concerns, though officials said the two men still planned to meet privately.
The two men had plenty of contentious issues to discuss. The Afghan and U.S. government are negotiating a security pact for the long-term presence of American forces in Afghanistan — the difficulty illustrated when a deal to transfer a U.S. prison outside of Kabul to Afghan authority on Saturday fell through at the last moment.
U.S. and Afghan officials are also at odds over a Karzai demand that U.S. special operations forces withdraw from a province neighboring Kabul by Monday over allegations they participated in torture and extrajudicial killing — charges U.S. officials deny. As the deadline approached, Dunford told reporters he spoke to Karzai about the issue on Saturday and told him the U.S. is working on a plan to hand over security in the Wardak region to Afghan forces. He would not directly say whether the commandos will stay in Wardak when the deadline to leave comes on Monday.
Karzai raised another difficult issue when he denounced the alleged seizure of a university student Saturday by Afghan forces his aide said were working for the CIA. It was unclear why the student was detained.
Presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi said in an interview with The Associated Press that the CIA freed the student after Karzai's staff intervened, but that Karzai wants the alleged Afghan raiders arrested. The president issued a decree on Sunday banning all international forces and the Afghans working with them from entering universities and schools without Afghan government permission.
The CIA declined to comment. NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Les Carroll said that no NATO forces "harassed a university student" as described by the President's office.
In the incident at the Kandahar university Saturday, presidential spokesman Faizi said the raiders fired shots as they grabbed student Abdul Qayoum, and blindfolded him before taking him for interrogation at a CIA post that Taliban leader Mullah Omar once used as a home.
The CIA has trained an Afghan counterterrorist force several thousand strong, known as the Counterterrorism Pursuit Team, which works mostly in insurgent strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan. U.S. officials say they work in concert with the Afghan intelligence service, but Karzai frequently complains he lacks oversight over their operations.
Karzai said in his speech that any foreign powers that want to keep troops in Afghanistan need to do so under conditions set forward by Afghanistan.
"We will tell them where we need them, and under which conditions. They must respect our laws. They must respect the national sovereignty of our country and must respect all our customs," Karzai said.
Karzai offered no proof of coordination, but said the Taliban and the United States were in "daily negotiations" in various foreign countries and noted that the United States has said that it no longer considers the insurgent group its enemy. The U.S. continues to fight against the Taliban and other militant groups, but has expressed its backing for formal peace talks with the Taliban to find a political resolution to the war.
Karzai said he did not believe the Taliban's claim that they launched Saturday's attacks to show they are still a potent force fighting the United States. "Yesterday's explosions, which the Taliban claimed, show that in reality they are saying they want the presence of foreigners in Afghanistan," Karzai said.
____
Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor and Heidi Vogt contributed to this report from Kabul.
4. Fukushima Two Years Later
Global symposium in NYC addresses mounting medical and ecological consequences, critiques WHO report
Press conference highlights radiation exposures of U.S. military personnel and lawsuit against plant owners
March 11-12 – New York Academy of Medicine
NEW YORK, March 5, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two years after the March 11, 2011 triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex, important new research and new information is emerging about continuing biomedical and ecological impacts in Japan and worldwide. This information was largely omitted from the methodology of a recent World Health Organization report on Fukushima. But a unique public symposium, "The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident," March 11-12 at the New York Academy of Medicine will explore it, and draw its implications for the public's health and safety in Japan, the U.S. and globally. A project of The Helen Caldicott Foundation, the symposium is co-sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Press conference: 1:00 pm Monday, March 11 there will be a press conference at the symposium with U.S. Navy Quartermasters (retired) Maurice Enis and Jaime Plym . They suffered radiation exposure and health damage while serving aboard the USS Ronald Reagan during a Fukushima aid and rescue mission. 150 mission participants are reported to have developed tumors, tremors, internal bleeding, hair loss and other health problems they attribute to radiation exposure. Enis and Plym will discuss the lawsuit they joined against Fukushima nuclear plant owner TEPCO for misleading U.S. officials about the extent of radiation released.
Symposium: 9:00 am on March 11 the symposium opens with special videotaped messages from Naoto Kan, Japan's Prime Minister during the Fukushima crisis, and Hiroaki Koide, Master of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Safety and Control Specialist at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute (KURRI). Then an international group of leading experts including Dr. Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; Dr. Hisako Sakiyama of the Japanese Diet's Fukushima Accident Independent Investigative Commission; Dr. Alexey Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences and many others will present and participate in panels (the full list of presenters is here).
In addition to reassessing Fukushima's impacts, it will also critique the recent WHO report claiming fallout from the disaster increased cancer risks only minimally. "The Fukushima crisis is far from insignificant; it's a globally important public health issue," said symposium organizer Dr. Helen Caldicott. "The WHO report ignores critical data and sends the wrong message to the public. Increased incidence of thyroid abnormalities in children in the Fukushima Prefecture may be an early indicator of eventual increased incidence of thyroid cancers. Plumes of radioactivity from Fukushima are migrating in the Pacific towards the U.S. West Coast."
The symposium takes place March 11 – 12 at the New York Academy of Medicine, at Fifth Ave and 103rd St (enter on 103rd St), beginning 9am March 11. Journalists and bloggers are invited to attend and cover free of charge. Please RSVP to the media contacts listed below.
Media Contacts: Josh Baran, jcbaran@gmail.com 917-797-1799 Stephen Kent, skent@kentcom.com 914-589-5988
5. GE Mandatory Labeling Laws Introduced in Florida
Genetically engineered foods have been a concern of many for quite some time now. For years, it was more an issue for vegetarians, environmentalists, pseudo-hippies, and ethically concerned chefs than for the general population. Not anymore. The presence -- and subsequent failure -- of Proposition 37 on California's ballot in November brought the labeling debate into the mainstream. Now individuals ranging from soccer moms to celebrities are airing concerns over GE foods. And they're finally being heard.
In Florida, a state not traditionally known for progressive political agendas, Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel-Vasilinda and Sen. Maria Lorts Sachs have introduced mandatory labeling bills that will be considered over the next few months.
See Also:
- Frankenfish Salmon Swims Closer to Your Plate
- Anti-Frankenfood Group Lobbies State Senator Sobel on Genetically-Modified Food; Holds "GE-Free Cook-off" This Saturday
- Keep Your Frankenfood Outta My Publix (Or at Least Label It, Please)
The bills, HB 1233 and S 1728, will require labeling for all foods that contain more than 1 percent GE ingredients, if passed. This would include plants that have been altered with alien genetic material to create genetic combinations that do not occur naturally. Most processed food will fall under these labeling laws, as they usually contain byproducts of GE corn, soy, or cotton.
According to the executive director of Food & Water Watch, Wenonah Hauter, "Labeling GE foods is not a novel idea. The European Union specifically addresses the new properties and risks of biotech crops, requiring all food, animal feed, and processed products with GE content to bear labels. In fact, the EU is among nearly 50 developed countries that require the GE products they import from the U.S. to be labeled. Furthermore, a 2012 Mellman Group Study showed that 91 percent of U.S. voters favored having the U.S. Food and Drug Administration require labels on GE foods and ingredients."
During the November election, the opposition to California's Prop. 37 -- namely major agribusinesses like Monsanto -- outspent the "Yes on 37" campaign 5-to-1. If you look at the numbers, that's hardly a competition. The bill, which started off with a 2-to-1 lead in some polls, ended being defeated 53 percent to 47 percent. With bills coming to the floor in Florida, we're going to bet you a strong opposition will start coming out of the woodwork.
We're going to hope that proponents of Florida's mandatory labeling laws learned from California's failure. Agribusinesses in California were able to strike fear into the population by arguing rising food costs. Would the costs have actually risen? Did the cost of margarine rise when the trans-fat mandatory labeling laws went into effect back in 2006? We haven't heard any complaints. Well, aside from the processed-food industry.
We would like to see a cogent argument from mandatory labeling supporters highlighting overarching health and environmental effects of GE foods. Although there have been no studies published on human health consequences resulting from intake of GE-foods -- for studies to be considered valid, they must be performed over the span of two generations -- there have been startling results discovered from long-term studies on rats. In the peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, the study examined the health effects of rats fed a diet of NK603 Maize (the Roundup-resistant corn developed by Monsanto) over their two-year lifespan. It concluded that rats fed the NK603 Maize had a higher incidence of cancers and tumors and shorter lifespans than the control rats. Seventy percent of the female rats and 50 percent of male rats died prematurely, contrasted to 20 percent for female and 30 percent male in the control. No, we're not comparing human DNA to that of rats, but we do believe in red flags.
Quite frankly, it's fucking common sense. NK603 is a seed that had been developed to tolerate dousings of chemical weed killer. Late last year, we spoke to pharmacist and biochemist Dr. Rober Fishman of Post Haste Pharmacy in Hollywood. According to Fishman, all animals (including humans) have DNA receptors that are replenished through nutrients -- i.e., food. The genes in foods that have been genetically modified -- including hybrids and less evil incarnations -- have been changed and do not appropriately fit into gene receptors. These foods do not provide the same sort of benefits as foods that have not been tampered with, whole foods. If a hybrid tomato is considered to be a subpar form of nutrition, what do you think is the case with gene structure of a plant that is meant to outlive toxic dousings of chemicals?
According to Rehwinkel-Vasilinda, "Politically speaking, if legislators would know the imperative nature of the facts, the passion of the people supporting it, and the diversity of people who are lobbying for this bill to pass, there must be something to it. This is not just one political interest or lifestyle interest. If we want to get this bill a hearing, we need a lot of press, a lot of citizens bugging their local representatives, and I need more co-sponsors. Although, already Rep. Mark Pafford has signed on as a co-sponsor."
Although there is a long way to go in terms of getting this bill to the floor, there is a chance. Call your local representative or senator if you want to see GE labeling on your food.
6. Kyodo: High concentration of Fukushima radioactive substances found in land animals — Frog with 6,700 Bq/kg outside evacuation zone
High concentration of radioactive cesium found in land animals
TOKYO, March 2, Kyodo
A high concentration of radioactive cesium has been found in a range of land animals and insects in areas around the site of the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, providing a clue to a mechanism of radioactivity accumulation in the food chain, a study showed Saturday.
According to a survey by the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and Hokkaido University, over 6,700 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137 was detected in a frog captured in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, some 40 kilometers west of the crippled nuclear plant.
The finding suggests animals positioned relatively high in the food chain tend to accumulate more radioactive materials, the research team said.
7.Fukushima cleanup workers break silence: Ordered to dump ‘debris’ into river — Gov’t “appeared not to believe him”
Asahi Shimbun, March 1, 2013: CROOKED CLEANUP: Workers break silence to allege boss ordered corner-cutting [...] Three laborers involved in radioactive cleanup around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant have alleged that a supervisor told them to dump debris in a river [...] At a news conference in the Diet building on Feb. 28, the men said a foreman ordered them to discard fallen branches and leaves into a river in an upland forest in Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, in November 2012. [...] this is the first time that decontamination workers have publicly come forward. [...] The third man, in his 40s, said he related what had happened to officials at the Environment Ministry. He spoke to them for more than an hour, he said, but they appeared not to believe him. [...]
8. Hanford Tanks are Leaking
OLYMPIA –As most of official Olympia repeatedly hit the “refresh” button Thursday morning on their computers to catch the state Supremes’ decision on tax supermajorities as soon as possible, a handful of legislators got a briefing on something with the potential for far more impact to the state.
Jane Hedges of the state Department of Ecology explained the intricacies of nuclear waste tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, doing her best to calm the uproar over recent news that six of the supposedly stable tanks are, in fact, leaking.
Trying to explain most things at Hanford to laypersons can be a Herculean task. . .
To read the rest of this item, or to comment, go inside the blog.
…once you get past the standard line that there’s tons of really bad stuff down there from all those nukes we made for the Cold War but, thankfully, haven’t had to use. So Hedges brought it down to a level that even legislators and reporters could understand.
First of all, the tanks are big. The largest are the size of a basketball court with a 75-foot wall around it. Inside the tanks are a “stew of different materials” that form a radioactive sludge, from which the liquid was supposed to have been pumped out years ago.
The sludge is about the consistency of peanut butter, Hedges said, but sometimes the interstitial liquid raises to the top. The what? Think organic peanut butter, she said. When it sits too long, it gets that oil layer on the top.
Of the 177 tanks, 149 only have a single wall, or shell, and 67 of those were “suspected leakers”, but the rest were thought to be secure. Thought to be is a relative term, because in a container that big, a drop of even a fraction of an inch can represent many gallons of waste. You can’t just drop a giant dipstick into the tank.
As Hedges explained, there’s no easy way to get an extremely accurate measurement because lowering cameras or instruments into the tanks isn’t practical. The stuff inside melts the instruments, and eats rubber and plastic. The methods they do have showed some minor fluctuations that could have been anomalies until further testing showed that six supposedly secure tanks are leaking as much as 1,000 gallons of radioactive liquid a year.
Getting the liquid out of the tanks is a problem. First, there’s no good place to put it right now, because the more secure double-shelled tanks are also pretty full. Second, there’s the danger of triggering evaporation of the liquid, which would cause a tank to heat up and create a deflagration.
“In our common words, a ‘Boom,’” Hedges said. Hanford was responsible for making things that could create the world’s biggest booms, but a boom in a tank is to be greatly avoided.
As chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, got to ask the question that most people’s minds were forming: Is there a safety threat?
“There is no threat to anyone at this time,” Hedges said. The leaking tanks are between 200 and 300 feet above groundwater, at least five miles from the Columbia River. They’re leaking below ground, so there’s no immediate danger to workers or the nearby communities, and a system to pump contaminated water out and clean it.
Long-term, though, the state needs the feds to get the radioactive waste into a more permanent solution, she said.
9. The Japanese Lied and are Lying
Steven Starr, Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri/Senior Scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility: The Japanese basically lied about what happened with the reactors for months. They said they were trying to prevent a meltdown, when in fact they knew within the first couple of days Reactors 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi had melted down, and they actually melted through the steel containment vessels.
So there was a worst case scenario that they were trying to hide, they even knew that at that time enormous amounts of radiation were released over Japan and some of it even went over Tokyo [...]
The melted core cracked the containment vessel, there really is no containment. So as soon as they pump the water in it leaks out again.
10. Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You
Data companies are scooping up enormous amounts of information about almost every American. They sell information about whether you're pregnant or divorced or trying to lose weight, about how rich you are and what kinds of cars you have.
Regulators and some in Congress have been taking a closer look at these so-called data brokers — and are beginning to push the companies to give consumers more information and control over what happens to their data.
But many people still don't even know that data brokers exist.
Here's a look at what we know about the consumer data industry.
How much do these companies know about individual people?
They start with the basics, like names, addresses and contact information, and add on demographics, like age, race, occupation and "education level," according to consumer data firm Acxiom's overview of its various categories.
But that's just the beginning: The companies collect lists of people experiencing "life-event triggers" like getting married, buying a home, sending a kid to college — or even getting divorced.
Credit reporting giant Experian has a separate marketing services division, which sells lists of "names of expectant parents and families with newborns" that are "updated weekly."
The companies also collect data about your hobbies and many of the purchases you make. Want to buy a list of people who read romance novels? Epsilon can sell you that, as well as a list of people who donate to international aid charities.
A subsidiary of credit reporting company Equifax even collects detailed salary and paystub information for roughly 38 percent of employed Americans, as NBC news reported. As part of handling employee verification requests, the company gets the information directly from employers.
Equifax said in a statement that the information is only sold to customers "who have been verified through a detailed credentialing process." It added that if a mortgage company or other lender wants to access information about your salary, they must obtain your permission to do so.
Of course, data companies typically don't have all of this information on any one person. As Acxiom notes in its overview, "No individual record ever contains all the possible data." And some of the data these companies sell is really just a guess about your background or preferences, based on the characteristics of your neighborhood, or other people in a similar age or demographic group.
Where are they getting all this info?
The stores where you shop sell it to them.
Datalogix, for instance, which collects information from store loyalty cards, says it has information on more than $1 trillion in consumer spending "across 1400+ leading brands." It doesn't say which ones. (Datalogix did not respond to our requests for comment.)
Data companies usually refuse to say exactly what companies sell them information, citing competitive reasons. And retailers also don't make it easy for you to find out whether they're selling your information.
But thanks to California's "Shine the Light" law, researchers at U.C. Berkeley were able to get a small glimpse of how companies sell or share your data. The study recruited volunteers to ask more than 80 companies how the volunteers' information was being shared.
Only two companies actually responded with details about how volunteers' information had been shared. Upscale furniture store Restoration Hardware said that it had sent "your name, address and what you purchased" to seven other companies, including a data "cooperative" that allows retailers to pool data about customer transactions, and another company that later became part of Datalogix. (Restoration Hardware hasn't responded to our request for comment.)
Walt Disney also responded and described sharing even more information: not just a person's name and address and what they purchased, but their age, occupation, and the number, age and gender of their children. It listed companies that received data, among them companies owned by Disney, like ABC and ESPN, as well as others, including Honda, HarperCollins Publishing, Almay cosmetics, and yogurt company Dannon.
But Disney spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said that Disney's letter, sent in 2007, "wasn't clear" about how the data was actually shared with different companies on the list. Outside companies like Honda only received personal information as part of a contest, sweepstakes, or other joint promotion that they had done with Disney, Mucha said. The data was shared "for the fulfillment of that contest prize, not for their own marketing purposes."
Where else do data brokers get information about me?
Government records and other publicly available information, including some sources that may surprise you. Your state Department of Motor Vehicles, for instance, may sell personal information — like your name, address, and the type of vehicles you own — to data companies, although only for certain permitted purposes, including identify verification.
Public voting records, which include information about your party registration and how often you vote, can also be bought and sold for commercial purposes in some states.
Are there limits to the kinds of data these companies can buy and sell?
Yes, certain kinds of sensitive data are protected — but much of your information can be bought and sold without any input from you.
Federal law protects the confidentiality of your medical records and your conversations with your doctor. There are also strict rules regarding the sale of information used to determine your credit-worthiness, or your eligibility for employment, insurance and housing. For instance, consumers have the right to view and correct their own credit reports, and potential employers have to ask for your consent before they buy a credit report about you.
Other than certain kinds of protected data — including medical records and data used for credit reports — consumers have no legal right to control or even monitor how information about them is bought and sold. As the FTC notes, "There are no current laws requiring data brokers to maintain the privacy of consumer data unless they use that data for credit, employment, insurance, housing, or other similar purposes."
So they don't sell information about my health?
Actually, they do.
Data companies can capture information about your "interests" in certain health conditions based on what you buy — or what you search for online. Datalogix has lists of people classified as "allergy sufferers" and "dieters." Acxiom sells data on whether an individual has an "online search propensity" for a certain "ailment or prescription."
Consumer data is also beginning to be used to evaluate whether you're making healthy choices.
One health insurance company recently bought data on more than three million people's consumer purchases in order to flag health-related actions, like purchasing plus-sized clothing, the Wall Street Journal reported. (The company bought purchasing information for current plan members, not as part of screening people for potential coverage.)
Spokeswoman Michelle Douglas said that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina would use the data to target free programming offers to their customers.
Douglas suggested that it might be more valuable for companies to use consumer data "to determine ways to help me improve my health" rather than "to buy my data to send me pre-paid credit card applications or catalogs full of stuff they want me to buy."
Do companies collect information about my social media profiles and what I do online?
Yes.
As we highlighted last year, some data companies record — and then resell — all kinds of information you post online, including your screen names, website addresses, interests, hometown and professional history, and how many friends or followers you have.
Acxiom said it collects information about which social media sites individual people use, and "whether they are a heavy or a light user," but that they do not collect information about "individual postings" or your "lists of friends."
More traditional consumer data can also be connected with information about what you do online. Datalogix, the company that collects loyalty card data, has partnered with Facebook to track whether Facebook users who see ads for certain products actually end up buying them at local stores, as the Financial Times reported last year.
Is there a way to find out exactly what these data companies know about me?
Not really.
You have the right to review and correct your credit report. But with marketing data, there's often no way to know exactly what information is attached to your name — or whether it's accurate.
Most companies offer, at best, a partial picture.
While Acxiom lets consumers review some of the information the company sells about them, New York Times reporter Natasha Singer discovered this summer that only a sliver of information is shared, including whether you have a prison record or bankruptcy filings.
When Singer finally received her report, all it included was a record of her residential addresses.
Some companies do offer more access. A spokeswoman for Epsilon said it allows consumers to review "high level information" about their data — like whether or not you're listed as making a purchase in the "home furnishings" category. (Requests to review this information cost $5 and can only be made by postal mail.)
RapLeaf, a company that advertises that it has "real-time data" on 80 percent of U.S. email addresses, says that it gives customers "total control over the data we have on you," and allows them to review and edit the categories (like "estimated household income" and "Likely Political Contributor to Republicans") that RapLeaf has connected with their email addresses.
How do I know when someone has purchased data about me?
Most of the time, you don't.
When you're checking out at a store and a cashier asks you for your Zip code, the store isn't just getting that single piece of information. Acxiom and other data companies offer services that allow stores to use your Zip code and the name on your credit card to pinpoint your home address — without asking you for it directly.
Is there any way to stop the companies from collecting and sharing information about me?
Yes, but it would require a whole lot of work.
Many data brokers offer consumers the chance to "opt out" of being included in their databases, or at least from receiving advertising enabled by that company. Rapleaf, for instance, has a "Permanent opt-out" that "deletes information associated with your email address from the Rapleaf database."
But to actually opt-out effectively, you need to know about all the different data brokers and where to find their opt-outs. Most consumers, of course, don't have that information.
In their privacy report last year, the FTC suggested that data brokers should create a centralized website that would make it easier for consumers to learn about the existence of these companies and their rights regarding the data they collect.
How many people do these companies have information on? Basically everyone in the U.S. and many beyond it. Acxiom, recently profiled by the New York Times, says it has information on 500 million people worldwide, including "nearly every U.S. consumer."
After the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported, Acxiom was able to locate 11 of the 19 hijackers in its database. How is all of this data actually used? Mostly to sell you stuff. Companies want to buy lists of people who might be interested in what they're selling — and also want to learn more about their current customers. They also sell their information for other purposes, including identity verification, fraud prevention and background checks. If new privacy laws are passed, will they include the right to see what data these companies have collected about me?
Unlikely.
In a report on privacy last year, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that Congress pass legislation "that would provide consumers with access to information about them held by a data broker." President Barack Obama has also proposed a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights that would give consumers the right to access and correct certain information about them.
But this probably won't include access to marketing data, which the Federal Trade Commission considers less sensitive than data used for credit reports or identity verification.
In terms of marketing data, "we think at the very least consumers should have access to the general categories of data the companies have about consumers," said Maneesha Mithal of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection.
Data companies have also pushed back against the idea of opening up marketing profiles for individual consumers' inspection.
Even if there were errors in your marketing data profile, "the worst thing that could happen is that you get an advertising offer that isn't relevant to you," said Rachel Thomas, the vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.
"The fraud and security risks that you run by opening up those files is higher than any potential harm that could happen to the consumer," Thomas said.
11. Japan's cleanup of radiation, other toxins from tsunami & nuclear fiasco anything but clean
NARAHA, Japan - Two years after the triple calamities of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster ravaged Japan's northeastern Pacific coast, debris containing asbestos, lead, PCBs — and perhaps most worrying — radioactive waste due to the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant looms as a threat for the region.
So far, disposal of debris from the disasters is turning out to have been anything but clean. Workers often lacking property oversight, training or proper equipment have dumped contaminated waste with scant regard for regulations or safety, as organized crime has infiltrated the cleanup process.
Researchers are only beginning to analyze environmental samples for potential health implications from the various toxins swirled in the petri dish of the disaster zone — including dioxins, benzene, cadmium and organic waste-related, said Shoji F. Nakayama of the government-affiliated National Institute for Environmental Studies.
Apart from some inflammatory reactions to some substances in the dust and debris, the longer-term health risks remain unclear, he said.
The mountains of rubble and piles of smashed cars and scooters scattered along the coast only hint at the scale of the debris removed so far from coastlines and river valleys stripped bare by the tsunami. To clear, sort and process the rubble — and a vastly larger amount of radiation-contaminated soil and other debris near the nuclear plant in Fukushima, the government is relying on big construction companies whose multi-layer subcontracting systems are infiltrated by criminal gangs, or yakuza.
In January, police arrested a senior member of Japan's second-largest yakuza group, Sumiyoshi Kai, on suspicion of illegally dispatching three contract workers to Date, a city in Fukushima struggling with relatively high radioactive contamination, through another construction company and pocketing one-third of their pay.
He told interrogators he came up with the plot to "make money out of clean-up projects" because the daily pay for such government projects, at 15,000-17,000 yen ($160-$180), was far higher than for other construction jobs, said police spokesman Hiraku Hasumi.
Gangsters have long been involved in industrial waste handling, and police say they suspect gangsters are systematically targeting reconstruction projects, swindling money from low-interest lending schemes for disaster-hit residents and illegally mobilizing construction and clean-up workers.
Meanwhile, workers complain of docked pay, unpaid hazard allowances — which should be 10,000 yen, or $110, a day — and of inadequate safety equipment and training for handling the hazardous waste they are clearing from towns, shores and forests after meltdowns of three nuclear plant reactor cores at Fukushima Dai-Ichi released radiation into the surrounding air, soil and ocean.
"We are only part of a widespread problem," said a 56-year-old cleanup worker, who asked to be identified only by his last name, Nakamura, out of fear of retaliation. "Everyone, from bureaucrats to construction giants to tattooed gangsters, is trying to prey on decontamination projects. And the government is looking the other way."
During a recent visit to Naraha, a deserted town of 8,000 that is now a weedy no-man's land within the 20-kilometre (12-mile) restricted zone around the crippled nuclear plant, workers wearing regular work clothes and surgical masks were scraping away topsoil, chopping tree branches and washing down roofs.
"They told me only how to cut grass, but nothing about radiation," said Munenori Kagaya, 59, who worked in the nearby town of Tomioka, which is off-limits due to high radiation.
Naraha's mayor, Yukiei Matsumoto, said that early on, he and other local officials were worried over improper handling of the 1.5 trillion yen ($16 billion) cleanup, but refrained from raising the issue, until public allegations of dozens of instances of mishandling of radioactive waste prompted an investigation by the Environment Ministry, which is handling decontamination of the 11 worst-affected towns and villages.
"I want them to remind them again what the cleanup is for," Matsumoto said in an interview. "Its purpose is to improve the environment so that people can safely return to live here. It's not just to meet a deadline and get it over with."
The ministry said it found only five questionable cases, though it acknowledged a need for better oversight. Another probe, by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry found rampant labour violations — inadequate education and protection from radiation exposure, a lack of medical checks and unpaid salaries and hazard pay — at nearly half the cleanup operations in Fukushima.
About half of the 242 contractors involved were reprimanded for violations, the ministry said.
An Environment Ministry official in charge of decontamination said the government has little choice but to rely on big contractors, and to give them enough leeway to get the work done.
"We have to admit that only the major construction companies have the technology and manpower to do such large-scale government projects," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue. "If cleanup projects are overseen too strictly, it will most likely cause further delays and labour shortages."
Minoru Hara, deputy manager at a temporary waste storage site in Naraha, defended the 3,000 workers doing the work — the only people allowed to stay in the town.
"Most of the cleanup workers are working sincerely and hard," Hara said. "They are doing a good job of washing down houses and cleaning up gardens. Such criticism is really unfair, and bad for morale."
Labour shortages, lax oversight and massive amounts of funds budgeted for the clean-up are a recipe for cheating. And plenty of money is at stake: the cleanup of a 20-kilometre (12-mile) segment of an expressway whose worst contamination exceeds allowable radiation limits by 10 times will cost 2.1 billion yen ($22.5 billion), said Yoshinari Yoshida, an Environment Ministry official.
"While decontamination is a must, the government is bearing the burden. We have to consider the cost factor," said deputy Environment Minister Shinji Inoue as he watched workers pressure wash the road's surface, a process Yoshida said was expected to reduce contamination by half.
The cleanup is bound to overrun its budget by several times, as delays deepen due to a lack of long-term storage options as opposition among local residents in many areas hardens. It will leave Fukushima, whose huge farm and fisheries industry has been walloped by radiation fears, with 31 million tons of nuclear waste or more. Around Naraha, huge temporary dumps of radioactive waste, many football fields in size and stacked two huge bags deep, are scattered around the disaster zone
The cleanups extend beyond Fukushima, to Iwate in the north and Chiba, which neighbours Tokyo, in the south. And the concerns are not limited to radiation. A walk through areas in Miyagi and Iwate that already were cleared of debris finds plenty of toxic detritus, such as batteries from cellphones, electrical wiring, plastic piping and gas canisters.
Japan has the technology to safely burn up most toxins at very high temperatures, with minimal emissions of PCBs, mercury and other poisons. But mounds of wood chips in a seaside processing area near Kesennuma were emitting smoke into the air one recent winter afternoon, possibly from spontaneous combustion.
Workers at that site had high-grade gas masks, an improvement from the early days, when many working in the disaster zone had only surgical masks, at most, to protect them from contaminated dust and smoke.
Overall, how well the debris and contaminants are being handled depends largely on the location.
Sendai, the biggest city in the region, sorted debris as it was collected and sealed the surfaces of areas used to store debris for processing to protect the groundwater, thanks to technical advice from its sister-city Kyoto, home to many experts who advised the government in its cleanup of the 1995 earthquake in the Kobe-Osaka area that killed more than 6,400 people.
But Ishinomaki, a city of more than 160,000, collected its debris first and is only gradually sorting and processing it, said the U.S.-educated Nakayama, who worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before returning to Japan.
"There were no technical experts there for the waste management side," he said. "They did some good work with chemical monitoring but in total, risk assessment, risk management, unfortunately they did not have that expertise."
Ultimately, just as they are choosing to live with contamination from chemicals and other toxins, the authorities may have to reconsider their determination to completely clean up the radiation, given the effort's cost and limited effectiveness, experts say.
Regarding the nuclear accident, "there has been so much emphasis on decontamination that no other options were considered," said Hiroshi Suzuki, a professor emeritus at Tohoku University in Sendai and chairman of the Fukushima Prefectural Reconstruction Committee.
Some places, such as playgrounds, obviously must be cleaned up. But others, such as forests, should just be left alone, since gathering or burning radioactive materials concentrates them — the opposite of what is needed since the more diluted they are, the better.
To a certain extent, policy is being dictated by politics, said Suzuki.
Before the accident, residents believed they were completely safe, he said. "The authorities want to be able to tell them once again that the area is safe. To do this they need to return it to the state that it was in before the accident."
Naraha resident Yoshimasa Murakami, a 79-year-old farmer, said he has low expectations.
A month after the government started cleaning his spacious home he has not seen a major decrease in radiation, he said while sitting on a balcony overlooking his traditional Japanese garden.
He set a dosimeter on the grass. It measured radiation nearly five times the target level and almost the same as the 1.09 microsieverts per hour found when officials surveyed it in December.
Murakami had come to the house for the day. He, his wife and daughter now live 50 kilometres (30 miles) away in Koriyama city.
He visits a few times a week to keep an eye on the cleanup workers. At nearly 80, Murakami says he doesn't mind about the radiation, but his wife does. And if he returns, his other relatives and grandchildren will be afraid to visit.
"Then, what's the point?" he said.
"I don't think decontamination is going to work," Murakami said. "The nuclear crisis is not fully over, and you never know, something still can go wrong."
12. Pentagon's new massive expansion of 'cyber-security' unit is about everything except defense Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the public-private National Security State
Glenn Greenwald
As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning announces "a major expansion of [the Pentagon's] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold." Specifically, says the New York Times this morning, "the expansion would increase the Defense Department's Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900." The Post describes this expansion as "part of an effort to turn an organization that has focused largely on defensive measures into the equivalent of an Internet-era fighting force." This Cyber Command Unit operates under the command of Gen. Keith Alexander, who also happens to be the head of the National Security Agency, the highly secretive government network that spies on the communications of foreign nationals - and American citizens.
The Pentagon's rhetorical justification for this expansion is deeply misleading. Beyond that, these activities pose a wide array of serious threats to internet freedom, privacy, and international law that, as usual, will be conducted with full-scale secrecy and with little to no oversight and accountability. And, as always, there is a small army of private-sector corporations who will benefit most from this expansion.
Disguising aggression as "defense"
Let's begin with the way this so-called "cyber-security" expansion has been marketed. It is part of a sustained campaign which, quite typically, relies on blatant fear-mongering.
In March, 2010, the Washington Post published an amazing Op-Ed by Adm. Michael McConnell, Bush's former Director of National Intelligence and a past and current executive with Booz Allen, a firm representing numerous corporate contractors which profit enormously each time the government expands its "cyber-security" activities. McConnell's career over the last two decades - both at Booz, Allen and inside the government - has been devoted to accelerating the merger between the government and private sector in all intelligence, surveillance and national security matters (it was he who led the successful campaign to retroactively immunize the telecom giants for their participation in the illegal NSA domestic spying program). Privatizing government cyber-spying and cyber-warfare is his primary focus now.
McConnell's Op-Ed was as alarmist and hysterical as possible. Claiming that "the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing", it warned that "chaos would result" from an enemy cyber-attack on US financial systems and that "our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well." Based on these threats, McConnell advocated that "we" - meaning "the government and the private sector" - "need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace" and that "we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment - who did it, from where, why and what was the result - more manageable." As Wired's Ryan Singel wrote: "He's talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation."
The same week the Post published McConnell's extraordinary Op-Ed, the Obama White House issued its own fear-mongering decree on cyber-threats, depicting the US as a vulnerable victim to cyber-aggression. It began with this sentence: "President Obama has identified cybersecurity as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counter." It announced that "the Executive Branch was directed to work closely with all key players in US cybersecurity, including state and local governments and the private sector" and to "strengthen public/private partnerships", and specifically announced Obama's intent to "to implement the recommendations of the Cyberspace Policy Review built on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) launched by President George W. Bush."
Since then, the fear-mongering rhetoric from government officials has relentlessly intensified, all devoted to scaring citizens into believing that the US is at serious risk of cataclysmic cyber-attacks from "aggressors". This all culminated when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, last October, warned of what he called a "cyber-Pearl Harbor". This "would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability." Identifying China, Iran, and terrorist groups, he outlined a parade of horribles scarier than anything since Condoleezza Rice's 2002 Iraqi "mushroom cloud":
"An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches. They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country."
As usual, though, reality is exactly the opposite. This massive new expenditure of money is not primarily devoted to defending against cyber-aggressors. The US itself is the world's leading cyber-aggressor. A major purpose of this expansion is to strengthen the US's ability to destroy other nations with cyber-attacks. Indeed, even the Post report notes that a major component of this new expansion is to "conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries".
It is the US - not Iran, Russia or "terror" groups - which already is the first nation (in partnership with Israel) to aggressively deploy a highly sophisticated and extremely dangerous cyber-attack. Last June, the New York Times' David Sanger reported what most of the world had already suspected: "From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons." In fact, Obama "decided to accelerate the attacks . . . even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet." According to the Sanger's report, Obama himself understood the significance of the US decision to be the first to use serious and aggressive cyber-warfare:
"Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons - even under the most careful and limited circumstances - could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks."
The US isn't the vulnerable victim of cyber-attacks. It's the leading perpetrator of those attacks. As Columbia Professor and cyber expert Misha Glenny wrote in the NYT last June: Obama's cyber-attack on Iran "marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet."
Indeed, exactly as Obama knew would happen, revelations that it was the US which became the first country to use cyber-warfare against a sovereign country - just as it was the first to use the atomic bomb and then drones - would make it impossible for it to claim with any credibility (except among its own media and foreign policy community) that it was in a defensive posture when it came to cyber-warfare. As Professor Glenny wrote: "by introducing such pernicious viruses as Stuxnet and Flame, America has severely undermined its moral and political credibility." That's why, as the Post reported yesterday, the DOJ is engaged in such a frantic and invasive effort to root out Sanger's source: because it reveals the obvious truth that the US is the leading aggressor in the world when it comes to cyber-weapons.
This significant expansion under the Orwellian rubric of "cyber-security" is thus a perfect microcosm of US military spending generally. It's all justified under by the claim that the US must defend itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact opposite: the new program is devoted to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to the rest of the world. It's the same way the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of developing defenses against such weapons (such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says came from a US Army lab). It's how the US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more arms and bombs more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined.
Threats to privacy and internet freedom
Beyond the aggressive threat to other nations posed by the Pentagon's "cyber-security" programs, there is the profound threat to privacy, internet freedom, and the ability to communicate freely for US citizens and foreign nationals alike. The US government has long viewed these "cyber-security" programs as a means of monitoring and controlling the internet and disseminating propaganda. The fact that this is all being done under the auspices of the NSA and the Pentagon means, by definition, that there will be no transparency and no meaningful oversight.
Back in 2003, the Rumsfeld Pentagon prepared a secret report entitled "Information Operations (IO) Roadmap", which laid the foundation for this new cyber-warfare expansion. The Pentagon's self-described objective was "transforming IO into a core military competency on par with air, ground, maritime and special operations". In other words, its key objective was to ensure military control over internet-based communications:
It further identified superiority in cyber-attack capabilities as a vital military goal in PSYOPs (Psychological Operations) and "information-centric fights":
And it set forth the urgency of dominating the "IO battlespace" not only during wartime but also in peacetime:
As a 2006 BBC report on this Pentagon document noted: "Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans." And while the report paid lip service to the need to create "boundaries" for these new IO military activities, "they don't seem to explain how." Regarding the report's plan to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum", the BBC noted: "Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet."
Since then, there have been countless reports of the exploitation by the US national security state to destroy privacy and undermine internet freedom. In November, the LA Times described programs that "teach students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage." They "also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives." The program, needless to say, "has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security."
In 2010, Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, gave a speech explicitly announcing that the US intends to abandon its policy of "leaving the Internet alone". Noting that this "has been the nation's Internet policy since the Internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s", he decreed: "This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now."
The documented power of the US government to monitor and surveil internet communications is already unfathomably massive. Recall that the Washington Post's 2010 "Top Secret America" series noted that: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." And the Obama administration has formally demanded that it have access to any and all forms of internet communication.
It is hard to overstate the danger to privacy and internet freedom from a massive expansion of the National Security State's efforts to exploit and control the internet. As Wired's Singel wrote back in 2010:
"Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race".
Wildly exaggerated cyber-threats are the pretext for this control, the "mushroom cloud" and the Tonkin Gulf fiction of cyber-warfare. As Singel aptly put it: "the only war going on is one for the soul of the internet." That's the vital context for understanding this massive expansion of Pentagon and NSA consolidated control over cyber programs.
Bonanza for private contractors
As always, it is not just political power but also private-sector profit driving this expansion. As military contracts for conventional war-fighting are modestly reduced, something needs to replace it, and these large-scale "cyber-security" contracts are more than adequate. Virtually every cyber-security program from the government is carried out in conjunction with its "private-sector partners", who receive large transfers of public funds for this work.
Two weeks ago, Business Week reported that "Lockheed Martin Corp., AT&T Inc., and CenturyLink Inc. are the first companies to sign up for a US program giving them classified information on cyber threats that they can package as security services for sale to other companies." This is part of a government effort "to create a market based on classified US information about cyber threats." In May, it was announced that "the Pentagon is expanding and making permanent a trial program that teams the government with Internet service providers to protect defense firms' computer networks against data theft by foreign adversaries" - all as "part of a larger effort to broaden the sharing of classified and unclassified cyberthreat data between the government and industry."
Indeed, there is a large organization of defense and intelligence contractors devoted to one goal: expanding the private-public merger for national security and intelligence functions. This organization - the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) - was formerly headed by Adm. McConnell, and describes itself as a "collaboration by leaders from throughout the US Intelligence Community" which "combines the experience of senior leaders from government, the private sector, and academia."
As I detailed back in 2010, one of its primary goals is to scare the nation about supposed cyber-threats in order to justify massive new expenditures for the private-sector intelligence industry on cyber-security measures and vastly expanded control over the internet. Indeed, in his 2010 Op-Ed, Adm. McConnell expressly acknowledged that the growing privatization of internet cyber-security programs "will muddy the waters between the traditional roles of the government and the private sector." At the very same time McConnell published this Op-Ed, the INSA website featured a report entitled "Addressing Cyber Security Through Public-Private Partnership." It featured a genuinely creepy graphic showing the inter-connectedness between government institutions (such as Congress and regulatory agencies), the Surveillance State, private intelligence corporations, and the Internet:
Private-sector profit is now inextricably linked with the fear-mongering campaign over cyber-threats. At one INSA conference in 2009 - entitled "Cyber Deterrence Conference" - government officials and intelligence industry executives gathered together to stress that "government and private sector actors should emphasize collaboration and partnership through the creation of a model that assigns specific roles and responsibilities."
As intelligence contractor expert Tim Shorrock told Democracy Now when McConnell - then at Booz Allen - was first nominated to be DNI:
Well, the NSA, the National Security Agency, is really sort of the lead agency in terms of outsourcing . . . . Booz Allen is one of about, you know, ten large corporations that play a very major role in American intelligence. Every time you hear about intelligence watching North Korea or tapping al-Qaeda phones, something like that, you can bet that corporations like these are very heavily involved. And Booz Allen is one of the largest of these contractors. I estimate that about 50% of our $45 billion intelligence budget goes to private sector contractors like Booz Allen.
This public-private merger for intelligence and surveillance functions not only vests these industries with large-scale profits at public expense, but also the accompanying power that was traditionally reserved for government. And unlike government agencies, which are at least subjected in theory to some minimal regulatory oversight, these private-sector actors have virtually none, even as their surveillance and intelligence functions rapidly increase.
What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies - Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam's chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs - has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.
Like all of these wildly exaggerated cartoon menaces, there is some degree of threat posed by cyber-attacks. But, as Singel described, all of this can be managed with greater security systems for public and private computer networks - just as some modest security measures are sufficient to deal with the terrorist threat.
This new massive expansion has little to do with any actual cyber-threat - just as the invasion of Iraq and global assassination program have little to do with actual terrorist threats. It is instead all about strengthening the US's offensive cyber-war capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and ensuring further transfers of massive public wealth to private industry continue unabated. In other words, it perfectly follows the template used by the public-private US National Security State over the last six decades to entrench and enrich itself based on pure pretext.
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