PNN - the Summer Art's Show

PNN 8/4/13

 Vicki Richards  - Classical Indian  / Jazz  Violinist
 Carol Stricht - Prisoner Art
 Samia Halaby - Palestinian Artist
 Ellen Christi - Jazz Singer
 Dianne Lininger - Writer, Blogger


1. Foreign nuclear experts late last month blasted TEPCO's lack of transparency over radioactive leaks.
 The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has given its first public estimate of the size of the leakage of radioactive tritium into the Pacific Ocean since the disaster.
Between 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of the substance is estimated to have leaked into the sea since May 2011, said Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO).
It was the first such figure TEPCO has released since a massive tsunami led to the accident in March 2011, a spokesman said Sunday.
The disaster sent reactors into meltdown and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents in the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl in 1986.
It was only last month that the embattled operator confirmed long-held suspicions of ocean contamination from the shattered reactors, as Japan's nuclear watchdog cast doubt on the utility's earlier claims that the toxic water was contained in the facility.
But TEPCO said the scale of the radioactive tritium leak, from May 2011 to July 2013, was around the level which had been allowed under safety regulations before the accident -- 22 trillion becquerels annually at the six-reactor plant.
The utility said it would also estimate the amount of cancer-causing strontium which may have leaked over the years.
The operator has also said the levels of underground water have risen as workers built shields to prevent groundwater seeping out into the ocean.
The company -- which faces huge clean-up and compensation costs -- has struggled with a massive amount of radioactive water accumulating as a result of continuing water injections to cool reactors.
A series of problems at the reactor site, including TEPCO's secretiveness, has drawn blunt criticism at home and abroad.
Foreign nuclear experts late last month blasted TEPCO's lack of transparency over radioactive leaks.
"These actions indicate that you (TEPCO) don't know what you are doing... you do not have a plan and that you are not doing all you can to protect the environment and the people," Dale Klein, former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told a panel in Tokyo.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/08/04/fukushima-operator-discloses-extent-nuclear-leak/#ixzz2b0c5zLaN


2. Renewed 'scrub' of Florida voter list has elections officials on edge
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott will soon launch a new hunt for noncitizens on Florida's voter roll, a move that's sure to provoke new cries of a voter "purge" as Scott ramps up his own re-election effort.
Similar searches a year ago were rife with errors, found few ineligible voters and led to lawsuits by advocacy groups who said it disproportionately targeted Hispanics, Haitians and other minority groups. Those searches were handled clumsily and angered county election supervisors, who lost confidence in the state's list of names.
"It was sloppy, it was slapdash and it was inaccurate," said Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards. "They were sending us names of people to remove because they were born in Puerto Rico. It was disgusting."
Over time, the state's initial list of suspected non-U.S. citizens shrank from 182,000 to 2,600 to 198 before election supervisors suspended their searches as the presidential election drew near.
"That was embarrassing," said elections chief Jerry Holland in Jacksonville's Duval County. "It has to be a better scrub of names than we had before."
Election supervisors remain wary of a new removal effort, which the U.S. Supreme Court effectively authorized in June when it struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling nullified a federal lawsuit in Tampa that sought to stop new searches for noncitizen voters, and Scott quickly renewed his call for action.
"If there's anybody that we think isn't voting properly, from the standpoint that they didn't have a right to vote, I think we need to do an investigation," Scott said the day of the high court decision. Last fall, Scott joined the Republican Party in a fundraising appeal that accused Democrats of defending the right of noncitizens to vote.
Scott's top elections official, Secretary of State Ken Detzner, is now creating a new list of suspected noncitizen voters by cross-checking state voter data with a federal database managed by the Department of Homeland Security.
Detzner's director of elections, Maria Matthews, sent a letter to election supervisors Friday, promising "responsible measures that ensure due process and the integrity of Florida's voter rolls" and vowing to include them "in the planning and decision-making."
Sen. Rene Garcia, R-Hialeah, chairman of the Florida Hispanic Legislative Caucus, said Detzner told him that the state would resume its purge of potential noncitizens within 60 days.
"I've been told that they will go slow," Garcia said. "I'm completely confident that the process will work."
Hillsborough County halted its purge last year after several voters on a list of 72 flagged by the state proved their citizenship.
A voter whose citizenship is questioned has the right to provide proof of citizenship in a due process system that includes certified letters and legal notices.
If the next list is anything like the last one, its burden will fall most heavily on urban counties with large Hispanic populations, notably Miami-Dade.
"Ineligible voters will be removed when their ineligibility is substantiated by credible and reliable data," said Miami-Dade Election Supervisor Penelope Townsley.
Townsley and a half-dozen county election supervisors interviewed across the state were emphatic that anyone who's not a U.S. citizen should not be able to cast a ballot. But they also say the state must meticulously document any case of a suspected ineligible voter and share all data with the counties — including access to the federal database known as SAVE.
Some supervisors remain irked that Detzner's office still has not granted them access to the database after promising to do so last fall.
Okaloosa County Election Supervisor Paul Lux said the state's questionable data damaged relations between the state and counties last year.
"We said then, 'If you can't give us good data, why should we kill ourselves vetting it?' " Lux said.
Relations have improved, but Lux said he's not hopeful that the SAVE database will be much better.
"If the federal government is as good at collecting data as they are with doing other things, then I've got to wonder about the quality of this data," Lux said. "If we get the information sooner, we can get started and have plenty of time to do our own due diligence."
Maria Rodriguez, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, which opposed previous removal efforts, said the state's motive is to remove poor and minority voters who are less likely to vote Republican.
"For every voter they purge, we will nationalize and register many, many more," she said.
Voter purges aren't necessarily a bad thing, said Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school.
She said many states require voter list maintenance efforts to prune the rolls of voters who are no longer eligible or who have died, but purges close to an election should be avoided.
"They offer lots of opportunities for eligible voters to get improperly removed because they frequently happen in a rushed, haphazard manner behind closed doors," Pérez said. "And the data is usually flawed."
On Twitter, Pasco County's Election Supervisor Brian Corley said: "Info from FL SOS (Secretary of State) must be credible & reliable! Integrity of voter rolls is paramount!"
Contact Steve Bousquet at bousquet@tampabay.com or (850) 224-7263.

3. Japan’s First Astronaut: Gov’t lies about Fukushima disaster — Vital info on radiation risks kept from public to “maintain law and order”
Former TBS reporter and Japan’s first-ever astronaut Toyohiro Akiyama's] home was only 32 km from [Fukushima Daiichi] [...] On March 12, he packed a few valuables, hung a portable radiation detector around his neck and drove his truck to the city of Koriyama [...]
As a former newsman, Akiyama was well aware not only of official reactions to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and other nuclear accidents in the past, but also of the workings of Japan’s “nuclear village” [...] Consequently, he knew that the Tokyo government would withhold vital information on radiation risks to “maintain law and order,” he says.
[...] I had reported on the fifth anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the Three Mile Island accident, so I knew all too well what the governments of the U.S. and Russia had done.
I had read books on how the Japanese government has dealt with nuclear accidents in the past. When there’s an emergency, what the authorities try to do is to maintain “law and order.” What is order? It’s protecting the system presiding at the time. [...]
The government was bound to lie. [...]

4. Title: The Plutonium Gang: CH2M Hill Dismantles the Hanford Nuclear Site
Source: Businessweek    Author: Steve Featherstone  Date: August 1, 2013
Before entering the shuttered Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site, Jerry Long hangs his identification badge on a board outside the entrance, so rescue crews can easily figure out who’s inside, should it come to that. “This is a no-kidding hazardous category 2 nuclear facility,” says Long [...] The U.S. Department of Energy reserves that category for sites that might blow up, or, as they like to call it, experience a “criticality event.” [...]
[There's] enough residual plutonium to build 10 bombs the size of the one that destroyed Nagasaki.
[...] the plant is highly contaminated with not only plutonium but also byproducts such as hexavalent chromium, made infamous by Erin Brockovich. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that over the years some 450 billion gallons of industrial and radiological contaminants were dumped directly into the soil. Some of it was stored, and Hanford’s aging complex of 177 underground tanks contain 53 million gallons of chemicals and radioactive liquids; 67 of the tanks have together leaked more than a million gallons. The DOE recently identified six more tanks that have sprung leaks, further threatening water supplies for millions across the Northwest. [...]

5. Obama’s Campaign Manager to Help Elect Conservatives
President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, is now going to spend his time working to get conservatives elected, but it will only be conservatives in the United Kingdom. From the BBC:
    The Conservative Party has hired Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina for its general election campaign team, BBC Newsnight has learned.
    Sources confirmed that he would act as a campaign strategy adviser to the Conservative party.
    A lifelong Democrat, Mr Messina masterminded the US president’s successful 2012 re-election campaign.
    The political parties in Westminster are readying themselves for the general election, now under two years away.

While the Conservative Party (aka Tories) in the UK is arguably not as right wing as Republicans, they are clearly on the right edge of the political spectrum in the UK. The Tories are responsible for implementing a misguided strict austerity policies which has devastated the economy and seriously hurt regular people in the country.

The fact that a top Obama adviser would feel comfortable in this party is telling.


6. Frack Gag’ Bans Children From Talking About Fracking, Forever
By Andrew Breiner on August 2, 2013 at 12:23 pm

When drilling company Range Resources offered the Hallowich family a $750,000 settlement to relocate from their fracking-polluted home in Washington County, Pennsylvania, it came with a common restriction. Chris and Stephanie Hallowich would be forbidden from ever speaking about fracking or the Marcellus Shale. But one element of the gag order was all new. The Hallowichs’ two young children, ages 7 and 10, would be subject to the same restrictions, banned from speaking about their family’s experience for the rest of their lives.

The Hallowich family’s gag order is only the most extreme example of a tactic that critics say effectively silences anyone hurt by fracking. It’s a choice between receiving compensation for damage done to one’s health and property, or publicizing the abuses that caused the harm. Virtually no one can forgo compensation, so their stories go untold.

Bruce Baizel, Energy Program Director at Earthworks, an environmental group focusing on mineral and energy development, said in a phone interview that the companies’ motives are clear. “The refrain in the industry is, this is a safe process. There’s no record of contamination. That whole claim would be undermined if these things were public.” There have been attempts to measure the number of settlements with non-disclosure agreements, Baizel said, but to no avail. “They don’t have to be registered, they don’t have to be filed. It’s kind of a black hole.”

The Hallowich case shows how drilling companies can use victims’ silence to rewrite their story. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that before their settlement, the Hallowichs complained that drilling caused “burning eyes, sore throats, headaches and earaches, and contaminated their water supply.” But after the family was gagged, gas exploration company Range Resources’ spokesman Matt Pitzarella insisted “they never produced evidence of any health impacts,” and that the family wanted to move because “they had an unusual amount of activity around them.” Public records will show, once again, that fracking did not cause health problems.

It’s not the only time gas exploration companies have gone to great lengths to keep the health problems caused by fracking under wraps. A 2012 Pennsylvania law requires companies to tell doctors the chemical contents of fracking fluids, so long as doctors don’t reveal that information, even to patients they are treating for fracking-related illness.
Credit: Earthworks

Sharon Wilson, and organizer with Earthworks, said that was the point. “These gag orders are the reason [drillers] can give testimony to Congress and say there are no documented cases of contamination. And then elected officials can repeat that.” She makes it clear she doesn’t blame the families who take the settlements. “They do what they have to do to protect themselves and their children.”

Wilson witnessed the very beginning of fracking in her own backyard. Some of the first experiments in combining horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing took place around her 42 acres of land in Wise County, Texas, on the Barnett Shale, and everyone was cashing in. But she saw the negatives first-hand. “I thought they were digging a stock pond, but it was actually a waste pit,” she said on the phone. “I caught them illegally dumping in streams and creeks.”

That led Wilson to start the work she continues to this day with Earthworks – helping landowners prove damage to their health and property from fracking, for eventual settlement. But as soon as the settlement comes, she said, “they get gagged. And then they can never talk about it again.” Wilson knew the Hallowichs, but now rarely talks to them, afraid she could cause them to run afoul of the gag order.

But even she was shocked that the Hallowich children would be gagged too. “How can you even do that?” she asked. “Is there a list of words the kids aren’t allowed to say?”

Peter Vallari, the Hallowichs’ lawyer, said that in decades of legal work, he had never seen such a thing, and could find no example of a similar gag order. “It’s not typical, and it was imposed on my clients, put in the way of an ultimatum,” he said by phone.

Wary of the bad press for putting a lifetime gag order on two minors, Pizzarella told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that “we don’t believe the [Hallowich] settlement applies to children.” This, despite ready availability of the settlement transcript, in which the company’s lawyer states “I guess our position is it does apply to the whole family. We would certainly enforce it.”

Vallari, the Hallowichs’ attorney, doesn’t buy Pizzarella’s retraction via press. “Their lawyers insisted on that language, and they said they wanted it enforced,” he said when reached by phone. “Until they write me a letter or sign a stipulation saying [it doesn't apply to the children], I don’t believe it.” Pizzarella did not respond to requests for interview.

Wilson, the organizer, said that even beyond making political action more difficult, gag orders are causing people direct harm. “When you get a settlement and get gagged, you can’t warn your neighbors,” she said. “Then your neighbors drink the very same water, and have health issues that are probably permanent.”

7. The Corporate Strategy to Win The War Against Grassroots Activists: Stratfor’s Strategies

Divide activists into four groups: Radicals, Idealists, Realists and Opportunists. The Opportunists are in it for themselves and can be pulled away for their own self-interest. The Realists can be convinced that transformative change is not possible and we must settle for what is possible.  Idealists can be convinced they have the facts wrong and pulled to the Realist camp.  Radicals, who see the system as corrupt and needing transformation, need to be isolated and discredited, using false charges to assassinate their character is a common tactic.

Part 1 of this exclusive Mint Press News investigation examined the strategies employed by Stratfor precursor Pagan International. So named for its founder Rafael Pagan, corporate clients hired the company with the aim of defusing grassroots movements mobilized against them around the world.

Part 2 takes a closer look at how Pagan International’s successor, Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin (MBD), revised and refined these strategies — and how what began as a corporate public-relations firm evolved into the private intelligence agency Stratfor, which wages information warfare against today’s activists and organizers.

Rafael Pagan — who died in 1993 — was not invited to be a part of his former associate’s new firm, Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin. His tactic of conquering and dividing activist movements and isolating the “fanatic activist leaders” lived on, though, through his former business partner, Jack Mongoven.

Mongoven teamed up with Alvin Biscoe and Ronald Duchin to create MBD in 1988. While “Biscoe appears to have been a largely silent partner at MBD,” according to the Center for Media and Democracy, Mongoven and Duchin played public-facing starring roles for the firm.

Duchin, like Pagan, had a military background. A graduate of the U.S. Army War College and “one of the original members of [Army] DELTA” — part of the broader Joint Special Operations Command that killed Osama Bin Laden — Duchin had jobs as a special assistant to the secretary of defense and as spokesman for Veterans for Foreign Wars prior to coming to Pagan.

Duchin served as head of the Pentagon’s news division during “Operation Eagle Claw,” President Jimmy Carter’s failed 1980 mission to use special forces to capture the hostages held in Iran.

Referred to by The Atlantic as the “Desert One Debacle” in a story Duchin served as a key confidential source for — as revealed in an email in the “Global Intelligence Files” announcing Duchin’s 2010 death — “Eagle Claw” ended with eight U.S. troops dying, four wounded, one helicopter destroyed, and President Carter’s reputation in the tank. The failed and lethal mission served as the impetus for the creation of the U.S. Special Operations.

Largely avoiding the limelight while working as Pagan’s vice president for Issue management and strategy — the brains of the operation — Duchin became a notorious figure among dedicated critical observers of the public relations industry while co-heading MBD. During MBD’s 15 years of existence, its clients included Big Tobacco, the chemical industry, Big Agriculture and probably many other industries never identified due to MBD’s secretive nature.

MBD worked on behalf of Big Tobacco to fend off any and all regulatory efforts aimed in its direction. Philip Morris paid Jack Mongoven $85,000 for his intelligence-gathering prowess in 1993.

“Get Government Off Our Back,” an RJ Reynolds front group created in 1994 by MBD for the price of $14,000 per month, serves as a case in point of the type of work MBD was hired to do by Big Tobacco.

“The firm has developed initiatives for RJ Reynolds that advocate pro-tobacco goals through outside organizations; among other projects, the firm organized veterans organizations to oppose the workplace smoking regulation proposed by OSHA,” explains a 2007 study appearing in the American Journal of Public Health. “[It] was created to combat increasing numbers of proposed federal and state regulations on the use and sale of tobacco products.”

Paralleling the Koch Family Foundations-funded Americans for Prosperity groups of today, “Get Government Off Our Back” held rallies nationwide in March 1995 as part of “Regulatory Revolt Month.”

“Get Government Off Our Back” dovetailed perfectly with the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America” that froze new federal regulations. The text of the “Contract” matched “Get Government Off Our Back” “nearly verbatim,” according to the American Journal of Public Health study.
‘Radicals, Idealists, Realists, Opportunists’

While its client work was noteworthy, the formula Duchin created to divide and conquer activist movements — a regurgitation of what he learned while working under the mentorship of Rafael Pagan — has stood the test of time. It is still employed to this day by Stratfor.

Duchin replaced Pagan’s “fanatic activist leaders” with “radicals” and created a three-step formula to divide and conquer activists by breaking them up into four subtypes, as described in a 1991 speech delivered to the National Cattleman’s Association titled, “Take an Activist Apart and What Do You Have? And How Do You Deal with Him/Her?”

The subtypes: “radicals, idealists, realists and opportunists.”

Radical activists “want to change the system; have underlying socio/political motives’ and see multinational corporations as ‘inherently evil,’” explained Duchin. “These organizations do not trust the … federal, state and local governments to protect them and to safeguard the environment. They believe, rather, that individuals and local groups should have direct power over industry … I would categorize their principal aims … as social justice and political empowerment.”

The “idealist” is easier to deal with, according to Duchin’s analysis.

“Idealists…want a perfect world…Because of their intrinsic altruism, however, … [they] have a vulnerable point,” he told the audience. “If they can be shown that their position is in opposition to an industry … and cannot be ethically justified, they [will] change their position.”

The two easiest subtypes to join the corporate side of the fight are the “realists” and the “opportunists.” By definition, an “opportunist” takes the opportunity to side with the powerful for career gain, Duchin explained, and has skin in the game for “visibility, power [and] followers.”

The realist, by contrast, is more complex but the most important piece of the puzzle, says Duchin.

“[Realists are able to] live with trade-offs; willing to work within the system; not interested in radical change; pragmatic. The realists should always receive the highest priority in any strategy dealing with a public policy issue.”

Duchin outlined a corresponding three-step strategy to “deal with” these four activist subtypes. First, isolate the radicals. Second, “cultivate” the idealists and “educate” them into becoming realists. And finally, co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry.

“If your industry can successfully bring about these relationships, the credibility of the radicals will be lost and opportunists can be counted on to share in the final policy solution,” Duchin outlined in closing his speech.
Bringing the ‘Duchin Formula’ to Stratfor

Alvin Biscoe passed away in 1998 and Jack Mongoven passed away in 2000. Just a few years later, MBD — now only Ronald Duchin and Jack’s son, Bartholomew or “Bart” — merged with Stratfor in 2003.

A book by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton — “Trust Us, We’re Experts!” — explains that MBD promotional literature boasted that the firm kept “extensive files [on] forces for change [which] can often include activist and public interest groups, churches, unions and/or academia.”

“A typical dossier includes an organization’s historical background, biographical information on key personnel, funding sources, organizational structure and affiliations, and a ‘characterization’ of the organization aimed at identifying potential ways to co-opt or marginalize the organization’s impact on public policy debates,” the authors proceeded to explain.

MBD’s “extensive files” on “forces for change” soon would morph into Stratfor’s “Global Intelligence Files” after the merger.

What’s clear in sifting through the “Global Intelligence Files” documents, which were obtained by WikiLeaks as a result of Jeremy Hammond’s December 2011 hack of Stratfor, is that it was a marriage made in heaven for MBD and Stratfor.

The “Duchin formula” has become a Stratfor mainstay, carried on by Bart Mongoven. Duchin passed away in 2010.

In a December 2010 PowerPoint presentation to the oil company Suncor on how best to “deal with” anti-Alberta tar sands activists, Bart Mongoven explains how to do so explicitly utilizing the “radicals, idealists, realists and opportunists” framework. In that presentation, he places the various environmental groups fighting against the tar sands in each category and concludes the presentation by explaining how Suncor can win the war against them.

Bart Mongoven described the American Petroleum Institute as his “biggest client” in a January 2010 email exchange, lending explanation to his interest in environmental and energy issues.

Mongoven also appears to have realized something was off about Chesapeake Energy’s financial support for the Sierra Club, judging by November 2009 email exchanges. It took “idealists” in the environmental movement a full 2 ½ years to realize the same thing, after Time magazine wrote a major investigation revealing the fiduciary relationship between one of the biggest shale gas “fracking” companies in the U.S. and one of the country’s biggest environmental groups.

“The clearest evidence of a financial relationship is the note in the Sierra Club 2008 annual report that American Clean Skies Foundation was a financial supporter that year,” wrote Mongoven in an email to the National Manufacturing Association’s vice president of communications, Luke Popovich. “According to McClendon, American Clean Skies Foundation was created by Chesapeake and others in 2007.”

Bart Mongoven also used the “realist/idealist” paradigm to discuss climate change legislation’s chances for passage in a 2007 article on Stratfor’s website.

“Realists who support a strong federal regime are drawn to the idea that with most in industry calling for action on climate change, there is no time like the present,” Mongoven wrote. “Idealists, on the other hand, argue that with momentum on their side, there is little that industry could do in the face of a Democratic president and Congress, and therefore time is on the environmentalists’ side. The idealists argue that they have not gone this far only to pass a half-measure, particularly one that does not contain a hard carbon cap.”

And how best to deal with “radicals” like Julian Assange, founder and executive director of WikiLeaks, and whistleblower Bradley Manning, who gave WikiLeaks the U.S. State Department diplomatic cables, the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the “Collateral Murder” video? Bart Mongoven has a simple solution to “isolate” them, as suggested by Duchin’s formula.

“I’m in favor of using whatever trumped up charge is available to get [Assange] and his servers off the streets. And I’d feed that shit head soldier [Bradley Manning] to the first pack of wild dogs I could find,” Mongoven wrote in one email exchange revealed by the “Global Intelligence Files.” “Or perhaps just do to him whatever the Iranians are doing to our sources there.”

Indeed, the use of “trumped up charges” is often a way the U.S. government deals with radical activists, as demonstrated clearly during the days of the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program during the 1960s, as well as in modern-day Occupy movement-related cases in Cleveland and Chicago.
‘Information economy’s equivalent of guns’

Just days after the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, The Austin Chronicle published an article on Stratfor that posed the rhetorical question as its title, “Is Knowledge Power?”

The answer, simply put: yes.

“What Stratfor produces is the information economy’s equivalent of guns: knowledge about the world that can change the world, quickly and irrevocably,” wrote Michael Erard for The Chronicle. “So if Stratfor succeeds, it’s because more individuals and corporations want access to information that helps them dissect an unstable world — and are willing to pay steady bucks for it.”

When it comes down to it, Stauber concurs with the “guns” metaphor and Duchin’s “war” metaphors.

“Corporations wage war upon activists to ensure that corporate activities, power, profits and control are not diminished or significantly reformed,” said Stauber. “The burden is on the activists to make fundamental social change in a political environment where the corporate interests dominate both politically and through the corporate media.”

Stauber also believes activists have a steep learning curve and are currently being left in the dust by Pagan, MBD, Stratfor and others.

“The Pagan/MBD/Stratfor operatives are much more sophisticated about social change than the activists they oppose, they have limitless resources at their disposal, and their goal is relatively simple: make sure that ultimately the activists fail to win fundamental reforms,” he said. “Duchin and Mongoven were ruthless, and I think they were often amused by the naivete, egotism, antics and failures of activists they routinely fooled and defeated. Ultimately, this is war, and the best warriors will win.”

One thing’s for certain: Duchin’s legacy lives on through his “formula.”

“The 4-step formula is brilliant and has certainly proven itself effective in preventing the democratic reforms we need,” Stauber remarked, bringing us back to where we started in 1982 with Rafael Pagan’s remarks about isolating the “fanatic activist leaders.”

This article is the second part of a two-part series on Stratfor. Check out the first part, “Divide And Conquer: Unpacking Stratfor’s Rise To Power.”

8. Tunnels under Fukushima plant suspected to have quake damage — Allows radioactive water to ‘move’ into ground — Still holding over 15,000 tons — High-level contamination flowing in from turbine buildings — Tepco “couldn’t afford to work on tunnels”

    [...] On the sea side of Nos. 1 to 4 reactors, there are two types of tunnels [...] and more than 15,000 tons of contaminated water remains there.

    Two years ago, the company did not conduct any work at locations other than the exit of test wells to prevent water leakage. It even failed to make any effort to remove the water from the tunnels at that time.

    A source close to the matter said, “As problems occurred one after another at that time, [the company] couldn’t afford to work on the tunnels.”

    As tunnels for electric cables are less resistant to earthquakes than reactors and other key equipment at the plant, they may have been damaged by the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. The bottom of the tunnels is lined with gravel, and leaked contaminated water may have moved to other spots where groundwater is located.

    Some tunnels are connected to turbine buildings where huge amounts of radioactive water are concentrated. TEPCO plans to launch work to drain the tainted water but is likely to face many challenges, including how to close the connections to the turbine buildings. [...]