Post Primary Predicament 8/31/14

PNN 8/31/14

Post Primary Predicament 

RWS

Luis Cuevas - Executive Director Progressive Push

Larry Aguilar - District 79's State Representative

Susan Smith - President Democratic Progressive Coalition

Will Rankin - Candidate for Florida's CFO (Chief Financial Officer)

Athena Ford - Outreach Coordinator Florida Chain

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Here is the registration link for the Health Care Reform 101 webinar 

on Thursday, September 4th at 1:00 PM. http://bit.ly/HCR101Sept4

Here is a link to join the CHAIN ReActors 

and some more information about them:http://bit.ly/CHAINReActors

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News

1. Heavy equipment falls into Fukushima reactor pool

TOKYO, Japan – A 400-kilogram (880-pound) machine part fell into a nuclear fuel pool at Japan's crippled Fukushima plant Friday, August 29, the operator said.

Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said it had not detected any significant changes in radiation readings or in the level of pool water at the No. 3 reactor.

A massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 ravaged Japan's northeastern coast and wrecked the plant, sparking meltdowns at 3 of its 6 reactors.

Friday's incident occurred shortly after noon during a remotely controlled operation to remove debris from the fuel pool at the unit where the broken reactor still lies untouched. The pool contains 566 fuel rods, most of which are spent.

The operating console of the fuel handling machine slipped loose and fell into the pool as it was about to be lifted by a crane, TEPCO said in a statement.

The console weighed 400 kilograms and measured 160 centimeter (63 inches) by 90 cm by 100 cm, a TEPCO official said.

Radioactivity readings at the pool remained unchanged at 3.2 millisieverts per hour after the incident, the statement said.

"The operation was being remotely controlled and there were no injuries caused to workers," the official said.

The meltdowns at Fukushima were the world's worst nuclear mishap since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and forced hundreds of thousands of local residents to evacuate nearby areas.

In a vivid reminder of the fragility of the area, a magnitude-5.0 quake struck off the Fukushima coast hours after Friday's incident.

Listen

2. Surveillance on FACEBOOK

The U.S. Government Can Brand You a Terrorist Based on a Facebook Post

Innocent people’s lives are being ruined. Why isn’t anyone watching the watchlist?

(from The Guardian)

The US government’s web of surveillance is vast and interconnected. Now we know just how opaque, inefficient and discriminatory it can be.

As we were reminded again just this week, you can be pulled into the National Security Agency’s database quietly and quickly, and the consequences can be long and enduring. Through ICREACH, a Google-style search engine created for the intelligence community, the NSA provides data on private communications to 23 government agencies. More than 1,000 analysts had access to that information.

This kind of data sharing, however, isn’t limited to the latest from Edward Snowden’s NSA files.  It was confirmed earlier this month that the FBI shares its master watchlist, the Terrorist Screening Database, with at least 22 foreign governments, countless federal agencies, state and local law enforcement, plus private contractors.

The watchlist tracks “known” and “suspected” terrorists and includes both foreigners and Americans. It’s also based on loose standards and secret evidence, which ensnares innocent people. Indeed, the standards are so low that the US government’s guidelines specifically allow for a single, uncorroborated source of information – including a Facebook or Twitter post – to serve as the basis for placing you on its master watchlist.

Of the 680,000 individuals on that FBI master list, roughly 40% have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation”,  according to the Intercept. These individuals don’t even have a connection – as the government loosely defines it – to a designated terrorist group, but they are still branded as suspected terrorists.

The absurdities don’t end there. Take Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a population under 100,000 that is known for its large Arab American community – and  has more watchlisted residents than any other city in America except New York.

These eye-popping numbers are largely the result of the US government’s use of a loose standard – so-called “reasonable suspicion” – in determining who, exactly, can be watchlisted.

Reasonable suspicion is such a low standard because it requires neither “concrete evidence” nor “irrefutable evidence”. Instead, an official is permitted to consider “reasonable inferences” and  “to draw from the facts in light of his/her experience”.

Consider a real world context – actual criminal justice – where an officer needs reasonable suspicion to stop a person in the street and ask him or her a few questions. Courts have controversially held that avoiding eye contact with an officer, traveling alone, and traveling late at night, for example, all amount to reasonable suspicion.

This vague criteria is now being used to label innocent people as terrorism suspects.

Moreover, because the watchlist isn’t limited to known, actual terrorists, an official can watchlist a person if he has reasonable suspicion to believe that the person is a suspected terrorist. It’s a circular logic – individuals can be watchlisted if they are suspected of being suspected terrorists – that is ultimately backwards, and must be changed.

The government’s self-mandated surveillance guidance also includes loopholes that permit watchlisting without even showing reasonable suspicion. For example, non-citizens can be watchlisted for being associated with a watchlisted person – even if their relationship with that person is entirely innocuous. Another catch-all exception allows non-citizens to be watchlisted, so long as a source or tipster describes the person as an “extremist”, a “militant”, or in similar terms, and the “context suggests a nexus to terrorism”. The FBI’s definition of “nexus”, in turn, is far more nebulous than they’re letting on.

Because the watchlist designation process is secret, there’s no way of knowing just how many innocent people are added to the list due to these absurdities and loopholes. And yet, history shows that innocent people are inevitably added to the list and suffer life-altering consequences. Life on the master watchlist can trigger enhanced screening at borders and airports; being on the No Fly List, which is a subset of the larger terrorist watchlist, can prevent airline travel altogether. The watchlist  can separate family members for months or years, isolate individuals from friends and associates, and ruin employment prospects.

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3. Insurers Are Fleecing Us Out of Billions While Congress Looks the Other Way

A year-long investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that health insurers may have fleeced taxpayers out of $70 billion in just five years.

You would think members of Congress in both parties would be so outraged they'd be launching their own investigation and railing against the "fraud and abuse" they decry on the campaign trail.

But I'm not holding out much hope. That's because I know just how powerful and influential the health insurance industry is and how its lobbyists almost always get what they want out of Congress and the White House, regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office.

The Center's Medicare Advantage Money Grab investigation, led by veteran reporter Fred Schulte, found that:

• Federal officials made nearly 70 billion in "improper" payments to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 to 2013, mostly overbillings, by manipulating or misusing a Medicare payment tool called a "risk score."

• From 2007 through 2011, Medicare Advantage risk scores rose more than twice as fast as the average for people in standard Medicare in more than 500 counties nationwide.

• Federal health officials have long kept key financial records of Medicare Advantage plans in a "black box," inaccessible to the public and press.

• Medicare Advantage health plans collect billions of dollars from controversial "house calls" that industry officials say help improve care but which critics argue inflate costs needlessly.

The findings did not come as a shock to me. During my two decades in the industry, at both Humana and Cigna, I came to understand just how much of a cash cow the Medicare Advantage program has become to insurers participating in the program. Wall Street financial analysts devote considerable attention to determining how much insurers' Medicare Advantage business contributes to their bottom lines and how much of the money they take in from the government is actually paid out in medical claims. The less they spend on medical care, the better, from Wall Street's perspective.

This is a huge business, and it's growing rapidly. This year alone, the government is expected to pay private insurers $150 billion to cover about 16 million Medicare beneficiaries. Almost one of every three Medicare enrollees now belongs to a privately operated Medicare Advantage plan.

Because the business is so profitable, insurers spend millions of dollars on lobbying, advertising, PR and "grassroots" political activities to keep the money flowing unimpeded.

It's not been a secret that the government has been overpaying the private insurers. The Congressional Budget Office has provided lawmakers with estimates of the overpayments a number of times in the past. One health policy expert testified that the extra payments to Medicare Advantage plans averaged 13 percent -- or $1,100 per enrollee -- in 2009 alone. In an effort to fix the problem, lawmakers included a provision in the Affordable Care Act to reduce the overpayments by several billion dollars over the next several years.

That prompted the industry to launch an intensive campaign to try to forestall those reductions. Having served on the strategic communications committee of America's Health Insurance Plans, I can imagine how sophisticated and multi-pronged the industry's campaign really is.

As I noted last January, AHIP formed a front group call the Coalition for Medicare Choices to intimidate lawmakers by posting ads on Washington buses and subway trains and on TV stations serving the area. The ads, which were part of a seven-figure campaign, warned that seniors would face higher costs, fewer benefits and a loss of provider choice if Congress and the Obama administration didn't act to keep plan rate cuts from going into effect.

In a POLITICO story at the time, an industry source was quoted as saying that, "If CMS (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) doesn't keep Medicare Advantage payment rates flat next year, it is going to create a huge political problem for members of Congress this fall when they have to face millions of angry seniors who just found out they are losing benefits and choices they were promised they could keep."

The industry has played the intimidation card many times over the years, and members of Congress, Democrats as well as Republicans, know it. When I was an industry executive, we used to joke about the "granny fly-ins" -- all expenses-paid trips for hundreds of seniors to DC for a day of lobbying -- coordinated by AHIP.

Even Charles Schumer of New York, who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from 2005-2009 and is the third ranking Democrat in the Senate, has become a champion of the Medicare Advantage program. Schumer was among 40 members of Congress who signed a letter to CMS supporting the insurers' cause earlier this year. Schumer and his colleagues wrote that seniors who join the plans "enjoy better health outcomes and receive higher quality care than their counterparts in the Medicare fee-for-service program."

The effort paid off. Health plan executives and financial analysts were happy that the relatively minor reductions were "not material to earnings," to use Wall Street jargon.

Listen

4. MOVING TO THE "RIGHT HILL"

Don't Do It, Hillary! Joining Forces With Neocons Could Doom Democrats

from Salon (Paul Rosenberg)

as Hillary Clinton forgotten why she’s not president?  In light of her headline-making Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, in which she seemingly echoed the neocons’ “who lost Syria/who lost Iraq” line, it would seem that she has. There are numerous folks around to remind her how foolish such saber-rattling is in terms of foreign policy effectiveness, but  given how smart Clinton is, she has to already know this herself — as the Atlantic’s own James Fallows noted in a typically savvy and well-crafted piece just a few days later:

Of course everyone including Clinton “knows” that you should only do something when it’s smart and not when it’s stupid. In her books and speeches, she is most impressive when showing commanding knowledge of the complexities and contradictions of negotiating with the Russians and Chinese, and why you can’t just “be tough” in dealings with them….

But in this interview — assuming it’s not “out of context” — she is often making the broad, lazy “do something” points and avoiding the harder ones. She appears to disdain the president for exactly the kind of slogan — “don’t do stupid shit” — that her husband would have been proud of for its apparent simplicity but potential breadth and depth. (Remember “It’s the economy, stupid”?)

But the problem isn’t  just that Clinton was acting deliberately stupid in foreign policy terms, for whatever reason. She was also acting deeply foolish in terms of domestic politics as well. Even if she can’t actually lose the Democratic nomination this time, such belligerent hawkishness could utterly wreck the Democratic Party, just as Lyndon Johnson wrecked it with his pursuit of the Vietnam War.

Of course it’s not popular to blame LBJ in that regard, but it’s impossible to ignore. Johnson won one of the most lopsided landslides in history in 1964, running as an anti-war candidate, and then, thanks to pursuing a war he didn’t even want, was driven out of office four years later, to be followed by 46 years now, in which Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for a total of just eight years. Yes, it’s always been fashionable to blame anti-war forces for the wreckage Johnson wrought, but Johnson, as president, was the one who set it all in motion — by embracing a moral crusade that he didn’t even believe in.  The question is — why?  And what does this tell us about Hillary?

The most comprehensive answer I know to these questions comes from Robert Mann’s 2001 book, “A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent Into Vietnam.” Mann, a professor at LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication, is a former Senate staffer, and his book is the only account of the Vietnam War to focus substantially on the role of the Senate, beginning in the Truman administration, as the “loss of China” and the unexpected outbreak of the Korean War suddenly thrust the Democrats into the minority for the first time in 20 years. Not only were Kennedy and Johnson both shaped by their Senate experiences in the aftermath of this loss, so were many other key actors as well — but none as much as Johnson, who unexpectedly became Senate minority leader in 1952.

The quickest way I can summarize Mann’s main thrust is to quote from my own Denver Post review of the book:

[Mann’s] approach illuminates a fundamental axis of power, because the Senate long has been the primary counterweight to the presidency in foreign affairs. If it proved an especially weak counterweight in preventing the war’s often secretive and deceptive escalation, Mann’s treatment of the early Cold War era makes it clear just how strong Senate influence was in establishing the basic parameters that later led to presidential secrecy and duplicity.

…. A majority of Senate Republicans, still isolationist at least as far as Europe was concerned, voted against NATO and the Marshall Plan, but enthusiastically rallied around Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade against the Truman Administration, especially after the Korean War began.

The opportunistic hypocrisy of their posturing crippled Truman’s congressional support in 1950, and captured both houses of Congress when Eisenhower swept into office two years later. But it left Eisenhower boxed in with no practical alternative but to continue Truman’s containment policies he and other Republicans had so mercilessly attacked.

The Truman-Eisenhower prelude takes up almost a third of the book, but it is time extremely well spent. Lyndon Johnson’s Senate leadership was defined by the struggle to reverse Democratic losses stemming from alleged softness toward communism, particularly in Asia. Mike Mansfield’s Senate leadership was shaped in reaction to Johnson’s style, as well as in deference to his role as President and party leader. By following the story through this formative period we gain unique insight into later behavior, such as the obsessive blindness that repeatedly prevented John F. Kennedy and Johnson from heeding the growing chorus of warning voices from Vietnam itself, from inside their administrations and from Capitol Hill.

But that’s only a brief summary. The real story has different layers of moving parts. Mansfield, for example, was so knowledgeable, Mann notes, he had been teaching Asian history as early as 1933, and in 1954, he saw everything wrong with the direction in which America eventually headed:

In his most prescient of moments, Mansfield warned that sending the American military to enter China would involve the nation “in every sense” in a “nibbling war.” “The terrain of the Indochinese conflict – the flooded deltas, the thousands of scattered villages, the jungles – is made to order for the nibbling of mechanized forces,” he said. “The French have been nibbled and chewed for years.”

The heart of the problem, Mansfield believed, was that Eisenhower continued to apply military solutions to a political problem.… Mansfield faulted the administration for having placed too much emphasis on the military power of Western nations. “Asian freedom,” he insisted, “must be defended primarily by Asians. A people whether in Asia or in the Americas, can preserve their independence only if they have it in the first place and if they are willing to fight to keep it.”

This reveals what I’m really afraid of — not so much that Clinton will swagger into quicksand over her head, like Johnson did, but more likely that she, like Mansfield, could nonetheless end up trapped into doing something that she could once have foreseen as folly.

Having been so concerned with Clinton’s reckless talk, I decided to do the sensible thing, and see if Mann saw things similarly. Unfortunately, he did.

In an interview, Mann first reaffirmed some major themes of his book. “The Truman and Democratic Party, in general, and congressional Democrats, in particular, took huge beatings at the polls in 1950 and 1952 and most of their problems involved the advance of Communism — particularly in Asia — and national security,” he said. “The public was persuaded — first by Joseph McCarthy and then by Eisenhower and Nixon — that they were weak on both.” As a result, Republicans won control of both the White House and Congress for the first time in 20 years.

“Democrats paid dearly,” Mann said. “Their defeat was catastrophic and the painful memories of it were long lasting for some leaders, particularly Lyndon Johnson. Future presidents Johnson, Kennedy, and Nixon were all in Congress at the time and the lesson was abundantly clear — don’t be weak on national security and don’t allow an inch of Asian soil to fall to the Communists.”

Mann pointed to the tapes of LBJ’s phone conversations with Georgia Sen. Richard Russell in 1964 and 1965. “It’s clear that Johnson is persuaded that he might lose his presidency unless he takes the strongest stance possible on fighting Communism in Southeast Asia,” he said. But it was a deeply misguided form of “political realism.”

“What Johnson didn’t realize is that the public had much shorter memories than the politicians,” Mann observed. “For Johnson, the electoral punishment the Democrats took in 1952 was severe and personal” — which is rather the opposite of realism. “Among his many mistakes in Vietnam was assuming the public still cared deeply about fighting Communism in Asia,” Mann continued. “It’s always perplexed me that Johnson forgot that by 1952 the public was already tired of fighting in Korea. In fact, one of the reasons the Democrats lost the 1952 elections was that Eisenhower promised to go to Korea and end the war,” which, of course, he did.

Of course, there is one line of counter-argument which Mann’s own book would support — that the Republicans  were unsurpassed in opportunistically switching positions, while keeping their moral outrage intact. Eisenhower, after all, didn’t have Nixon accusing him of treason when he made peace — just as Nixon didn’t have Nixon calling himself a traitor when he went to China. Just to underscore how convoluted and opportunistic the Republicans were during this era, consider Mann’s account of how a leading Republican senator — and presidential hopeful — responded to the 1950 elections:

The 1950 elections only confirmed [Ohio Senator Robert] Taft’s  decision to strike an even more partisan, hard-line position against Truman and the new 82nd Congress…

Taft wasted no time. In January, he launched his renewed campaign against Truman by embracing the nationalistic “Fortress America” sentiments of former Pres. Herbert Hoover, who had only recently advocated a drastic reduction of America’s military commitments around the world, especially in Europe and Asia. “We Americans alone,” Hoover said, “with sea and air power, can so control the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that there can be no possible invasion of the Western Hemisphere by Communist  armies.”

Taft, of course, had long held that the Far East was “more important to our future peace than is Europe.” He demonstrated just how much he agreed with Hoover when he formally opposed Truman’s plans to implement the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. Taft voted against NATO and now he stood adamantly opposed to Truman’s plan to send four divisions to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union. In early January 1951, Taft told the Senate that the US should “commit no American troops to the European continent at this time.” When Illinois Democrat Paul Douglas reminded Taft that the fall of Western Europe would leave the Continent’s industrial potential in Soviet hands, Taft replied that, in that event, the United States could destroy those industrial facilities with bombs. Taft’s extraordinary logic was too much for J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, who interrupted to say that it was “a very shocking thing for Europeans to realize that we are willing to contemplate their destruction.”

Those who may think that today’s neocons are unprecedentedly unhinged should take note. If Republicans could make such whack-job “policy” work for them even then, the argument might go, then perhaps Clinton isn’t so crazy after all?  But that sort of thinking ignores the Democrats’ real advantages — most notably the deep popularity of their domestic political agenda. Even in 1952, Democrats still won slightly more House votes than Republicans did, and they quickly retook Congress. Eisenhower embraced the New Deal programs that earlier GOP candidates had opposed, and even Richard Nixon, two decades later, signed so many Democratic domestic bills that he’s often held up as a secret liberal — not because he was, but because he had to go along, in order to survive and focus on what mattered to him most. In the long run, Nixon was able to start bending politics in a whole new direction — but only because Johnson, acting out of fear, had opened the door for him by fracturing his own party.

And that’s what Clinton could be doing once again — only she would be undermining an emerging majority that hasn’t even gelled yet, rather than one that’s been around for a generation.

“I think you could argue that Clinton is still operating from a mindset that once influenced many Democrats to support war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Mann said. “They got beat up badly in the early 1990s for opposing GHW Bush in Iraq and they vowed never to be caught being weak on terrorism (and use of military force) again. After 9-11, there was nothing to be gained, and everything to be lost, by appearing weak on terrorism/Iraq.”

But isn’t ISIS really evil? Well, yes, they are. Maybe even evil enough to make it clear how over the top some earlier claims of absolute evil were. And certainly evil enough to be at war with half a dozen other Muslim outfits. Which bring us to another lesson Mann points out.

“Another key lesson from my book is the mistake of looking at communism as a monolithic worldwide force,” Mann said “There were Soviet Communists, Chinese Communists, Vietnamese Communists, Yugoslavian Communists, etc. Fulbright spent a lot of time talking about how we needed to take a more sophisticated, nuanced approach to the communists. Some of his colleagues and Johnson thought he was crazy.”

And now? “Fulbright’s lesson applies to terrorists and the Muslim world,” Mann pointed out. “Not every radical Muslim is an enemy of the U.S. Not every terrorist is out to attack the U.S. Not every Muslim is radical and violent, etc. We never seem to have the capacity for any kind of sophisticated, informed assessment of the world around us. Like George W. Bush, you’re either with us or with the people who want to destroy us.” That sort of mindset is what created most of the enemies we’re facing in the first place.

In his article, Fallows made a very similar point:

Yeah, we should have “done something” in Syria to prevent the rise of ISIS. But the U.S. did a hell of a lot of somethings in Iraq over the past decade, with a lot more leverage that it could possibly have had in Syria. And the result of the somethings in Iraq was … ? A long story in the NYT tells us that the current leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph himself, drew his political formation from America’s own efforts to “do something” in Iraq….

Here’s the dirtiest of dirty little secrets — and it’s not really a secret, it’s just something no one ever talks about: The entire jihadi mess we’re facing now all descends from the brilliant idea of “giving the Soviets their own Vietnam” in Afghanistan. How’s that for learning a lesson from Vietnam? Well, that’s the lesson that Jimmy Carter’s crew learned — and Ronald Reagan’s gang was only too happy to double down on.

“Finally,” Mann told me, “is the unwillingness to learn much if anything about our foes. We failed to learn about Vietnam, its people, culture and history. We refused to understand that we were fighting a nationalist insurgency that cared more about independence (mostly from China hegemony) than it did about Communism.”  Tragically, Mann quotes Kennedy on several occasions clearly seeing this — at a time when we were still merely assisting the French.

“Ho took help from the Communists because they were willing to help him fight for independence,” Mann continued. “He eventually became a committed Communist, I believe, but I don’t think he started out as one. He tried to get us to help him, because he actually thought we were serious about self determination.”

Something very similar happened when we missed the opportunity to fully support the Arab Spring. If we don’t have the courage of our own convictions, it’s folly to expect others to believe in them for us. That goes for voters here in America, too.

Listen

5. Hilary (LOVES GM FOODS)

In her June 25 keynote address to the BIO International Convention in San Diego, Calif., Hillary Clinton voiced strong support for genetic engineering and genetically engineered crops. She earned a standing ovation that day by statingthat the biotech industry suffers from a public perception problem and that it just needs “a better vocabulary” in order to persuade GMO skeptics who don’t understand “the facts” about genetic engineering.

And then Hillary proceeded to get the facts wrong.

Why does it matter what Hillary, who holds no public office and has not (yet) declared her candidacy for president, says or believes about genetic engineering and genetically modified crops and foods?

It doesn’t. Unless she throws her hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination. And then it matters not just what her position on GMOs is, not just how deep her financial ties with the biotech industry run, not just how much she distorts the facts about the “promise” of biotech crops.

It matters, deeply, to more than 90 percent of Americans, what her position is on GMO labeling laws.

If elected, will Hillary support consumers’ right to know? Or will she support the DARK Act, a billintroduced in Congress earlier this year, that would preempt state GMO labeling laws?

Hillary has been coy about announcing her candidacy. On clarifying her position on GMO labeling laws, she’s been dead silent.

As she soon heads to Iowa—the testing ground for presidential candidates—Hillary’s presidential aspirations will no doubt become more clear. If she runs, as the pundits predict, it will be up to the GMO labeling movement to demand that she take a stand on GMO labeling laws.

Meanwhile, here’s why Hillary’s speech to the BIO convention was just plain wrong.

Read the essay

6. 50,000 US BACKED TROOPS IN UKRAINE 

The U.S. Government installed in February 2014 the current Ukrainian Government, which started Ukraine's civil war against the residents in Ukraine's southeast, who reject this Government. The U.S., and the Ukrainian Government that the U.S. installed, call the residents there "terrorists," for refusing to be ruled by the people that the U.S. imposed in February to lead Ukraine.

According to the man whom we installed to lead Ukraine, "by now about 50 thousand soldiers and officers appear participants in the antiterrorist operation: 'Thousands are wounded. Many families were left without a breadwinner'." That quotation is from an article that was published on August 11th by the Press Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian Government. Their press release was quoting Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom Obama's agent Victoria Nuland had selected on February 4th (18 days before the overthrow) to become the Prime Minister of Ukraine. (The transcript of the complete phone call in which the EU came to know that the U.S. had engineered this regime-change is in italics here.)

And here is the result of the bombs that our people have been dropping on those 'terrorists.'

And here is what these 'terrorists' themselves have to say about that.

Western 'news' media don't report this news, which is why all of it might come as a shock to 99% of Americans, and of the residents of other NATO countries. (That's why I provide those links: so that you can easily verify these things for yourself.)

We call this a "free press" and a "democracy." This is what America is trying to impose worldwide. But there is lots of resistance to it, not only in Ukraine, but worldwide.

People throughout the world believe overwhelmingly that the United States is the greatest threat to world peace; and if our invasion and corrupt and disastrous occupation of Iraq don't suffice to make the point, then our coup and installation of nazis into controlover Ukraine certainly should.

Why Are We Doing This?

It's not by happenstance; it's by careful design. A reader-comment at the site of a specialist on Ukraine described in the following words the February coup:

7. European Nuclear News

Spurred into action by an EU directive, and after decades of apparent inactivity, EU members are finally tackling the vexed issue of how to deal with nuclear waste.

The favoured solutions involve stocking the ultra-toxic material deep underground and it is those that we turn the spotlight on in this edition of Reporter, produced by Hans Von der Brelie.

We visit two sites where work is already underway and at which billions of euros have literally been poured into holes in the ground.

At the ANDRA facility in eastern France work has begun on entombing the country’s 80,000 cubic metres of waste in a layer of clay half a kilometre below the ground where, it is argued, it will be safe for all time. Back on the surface local villagers are very concerned, their own research having fuelled their fears.

We look at both sides of the argument.

In Finland they take a slightly different approach; drilling deep into the bedrock to bury the waste.

We also get privileged access to the site on a remote Finnish peninsula where this work is taking place.

Our reporter sees the silos where the material will be stored after being encased in copper. What he saw gives rise to some troubling questions.

Take a look at the video.

Esa Härmälä, Director General of the Energy Department in the Finnish Ministry of Economy, explains the pro-nuclear energy decision of Finland and the Finnish concept of the nuclear waste repository to be built. Euronews met him in Helsinki, to listen to the full interview (English language), please use this link.

Bonus interview: Esa Härmälä

Interview with the French anti-nuclear activist Corinne Francois (Bure Stop 55), fighting against the planned nuclear waste repository in Bure (Meuse/Haute-Marne). Euronews met her in Bar-le-Duc, to listen to the full interview (French language), you can use this link.

Interview bonus : Corinne François, militante anti-nucléaire

Interview with the French anti-nuclear activist Francois Mativet (Bure Zone Libre), fighting against the planned nuclear waste repository in Bure (Meuse/Haute-Marne). To listen to the full interview (French language), please use this link.

Interview bonus : François Mativet, militant anti-nucléaire

Here is a link you can use to listen to the interview with Alain Rolland, Technical Director of ANDRA/Bure, explaining to euronews the reasons why France wants to put its nuclear waste into a deep underground repository. Use this link (Interview in French language).

Interview bonus : Alain Rolland, directeur technique de l’ANDRA