Even a child has more sense...

H/T to my friend Amanda for providing this video.  Severn Suzuki address at UN Earth Summit 1992.

A Revolution for Renewables: Germany Approves End to the Nuclear Era - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,771646,00.html
It's official: Germany's "Energy Revolution" has begun. The country's parliament on Thursday passed a series of laws that will push forward the phase-out of nuclear plants and promote renewable energies. The world's fourth-largest industrial nation is scheduled to be nuclear-free by 2022, but will its reliance on fossil fuels increase?


Will anti-nuclear protests, like this one held ahead of an important vote in parliament in Berlin on Thursday, become less common now that Germany is abandoning the atom?

Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag, passed a historic package of laws Thursday that commits the nation -- once and for all -- to a phase-out of nuclear power by 2022. The step is unprecedented in Europe, and it marks the final act in a decades-long political drama that began with a grassroots anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s, which gave rise to the German Green Party.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has led the charge against nuclear power only since March, but the Bundestag this morning voted overwhelmingly to close Germany's remaining nine active plants according to a fixed, 11-year schedule. The vote was 513:79, with eight abstentions. Many of the "no" votes came from the Left Party, which argued for a swifter timeline.


'Malice, Calumny, Insult and Defamation'

A nuclear phase-out plan was first approved a decade ago, under a previous government consisting of Social Democrats and Greens, but Chancellor Angela Merkel's more conservative coalition had retracted the plan last year -- granting some nuclear plants another 14 years of life. She quickly reversed course after the accident at Japan's Fukushima reactors in March.

The reversal is remarkable for a leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, who are considered close to the German nuclear lobby. But the center-left Social Democrats and Greens have been uncomfortable with the recent attention focused on Merkel, since the phase-out was originally their idea.

Sigmar Gabriel, a former environmental minister for the Social Democrats, railed on Thursday that his party and the Greens had suffered nothing but "malice, calumny, insult, and defamation" from conservatives for the older phase-out plan.

He accused Merkel's government of opportunism, repeating the common criticism that her reversal was a desperate political response to the general unpopularity of nuclear power among German voters.

Economics Minister Philipp Rösler, who is head of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party and also deputy chancellor, said Gabriel's criticism "lacked credibility." A previous economics minister, Michael Glos, of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats, declared he would not vote for the phase-out at all. "There are a number of reasons why I cannot agree to this," he said, but the main reason, he claimed, was that an end to nuclear power would mean a domestic revival of coal.

The end of nuclear power would force Germany to use more fossil fuels, he argued, "because the development of renewable energies won't be fast enough."

The Greening of Germany

Thursday's package of laws, however, commits Germany to an ambitious green-energy course. By 2020 the national fraction of power drawn from renewable sources -- solar, wind, biomass, etc. -- will have to double from today's 17 to 35 percent. Government subsidies for water power and geothermal energy will be increased, but support for solar, biomass, and land-based wind energy will fall.

Part of the government strategy is to allow for a huge expansion of wind turbines on the North Sea -- some 25,000 megawatts' worth of new offshore wind power will have to be developed by 2030. Germany will also need a larger supergrid to move the current from the north to growing cities, like Munich, in the south. For that the new laws call for the addition of some 3,600 kilometers to the country's "energy Autobahn" of high-capacity power lines.


The package also includes tax incentives to renovate buildings erected before 1995, so they meet modern heating and insulation standards. Germany has already committed to a European Union goal of slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent before 2020.

Merkel has said she would prefer that energy providers not buy nuclear power from neighboring countries like France in order to make up the shortfall after 2022. By this September the Federal Network Agency, which oversees German energy markets, will decide whether one of the eight nuclear plants already closed in recent months should be kept ready on a "cold reserve" basis, to ease bottlenecks in the national energy supply.

msm, spiegel

Questions about Iraq

After 8 years of invasion and occupation, after crimes against humanity, after hundred thousands of deaths (after documented civilian deaths 101,426 – 110,810 Full analysis of the Wikileak's Iraq War Logs may add 15,000 civilian deaths.) http://www.iraqbodycount.org/.....

Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's

governing style raises questions about future of Iraq's fragile democracy

Maliki first gained the premiership because he seemed relatively weak. The December 2005 national elections had failed to produce a clear winner, and Iraq's fractious new parliamentarians were able to agree on Maliki largely because he was nobody's first choice. A lesser-known leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, Maliki had long-standing credentials in the Dawa Party that had opposed Saddam Hussein. He was religious enough to pass muster with Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and came to power with the electoral support of more hard-line Shiite political blocs -- those led by Moqtada al-Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Yet he was secular enough to avoid sparking a major sectarian controversy with mainstream Sunnis, and he had a good relationship with leaders in Iraq's semiautonomous northern Kurdish region, with whom he had worked to oppose Saddam. Maliki was also receptive to American help, and he had a good rapport with President George W. Bush. According to a former senior official in the Bush administration, the two presidents had weekly phone calls in which they would share complaints about the hostile politicians in their respective legislatures.

Since late January, demonstrators had begun taking to the streets by the hundreds, then thousands. They were fed up. A year earlier, Iraqis had braved terrorist bombs to vote in national elections; then, their new leaders spent more than nine months haggling behind concrete blast walls in the fortified Green Zone over who would be in charge. The success of free and fair elections had given way to a uniquely democratic challenge -- nobody had won an outright majority -- and Iraq's leaders were by disposition unprepared to meet it. The former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, appeared to have the most seats in the parliament, but neither he nor Maliki, who led the second-largest bloc, was willing to compromise his claim on the premiership.

As summer arrived, the heat soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Baghdadis received less than five hours of electricity per day; their idle air-conditioners served as constant reminders of their government's failure to provide even basic services. Unemployment was stagnant. And though suicide attacks and roadside bombs had subsided since the hellish days of 2006 and 2007, unpredictable explosions still blew apart lives and families. By November, Maliki had outmaneuvered Allawi into a second term. The new government looked a lot like the old government.

If Iraq's

prime minister indeed has dictatorial tendencies, as his detractors allege, they do not include self-promotion of the Hussein variety. Maliki's aides say the prime minister was furious, and they suspect the billboards may have been raised to discredit him at a critical moment in the negotiations for a new government - to fuel perceptions that he is another Iraqi strongman in the making.

 That Maliki has an authoritarian streak has been amply demonstrated over the past 4 1/2 years, critics say. Maliki, originally selected in 2006 as a compromise candidate assumed to be weak and malleable, has proved to be a tough and ruthless political operator who cannily subverted parliament to cement his authority over many of the new democracy's fledgling institutions.

In his role as commander in chief of the armed forces, he replaced divisional army commanders with his appointees, brought provincial command centers under his control and moved to dominate the intelligence agencies.

The widely feared Baghdad Brigade, which answers directly to Maliki's office, has frequently been used to move against his political opponents. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have accused him of operating secret prisons in which Sunni suspects have been tortured.

Supposedly independent bodies, including the Commission on Integrity, designed to investigate corruption, and the Property Claims Commission, which settles Hussein-era land disputes, have seen their parliament-appointed directors removed and replaced with Maliki loyalists, without parliamentary approval.

 "We've seen Maliki move with masterful precision to control the army, then the intelligence services, and then secure a tighter and tighter grip over the civilian arms of state," said Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the University of London's Queen Mary College.

"These aren't the actions of a decentralizing democrat. These are the actions of a man who wants to concentrate as much power as possible in his own hands."

Camp Ashraf Massacre

Two weeks after an attack by Iraqi security forces against Camp Ashraf, a base for Iranian exiles, killed 34 people and left over 300 injured, international and humanitarian law experts have urged the U.N. to conduct an impartial investigation regarding the role of Prime Minister Nouri Al- Maliki, as well as Iran and the United States, in the massacre.

"If the international community is serious about what it says in terms of defending unarmed people against violence and killing, and if the U.N. believes in the responsibility to protect, then of course it must take action against those who attack and kill innocent people, and they should be brought to justice," Ali Safavi, president of Near East Policy Research, a Virginia-based think tank, told Inter Press Service (IPS).

Some observers have criticised the U.N.'s delayed response to the latest incident. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay waited seven days to condemn the attack, finally stressing "there is no possible excuse for this number of casualties."

She urged "(Iraqi) authorities to take measures" and to prosecute any person found responsible for use of excessive force through a "full, independent and transparent inquiry".

The U.N. secretary-general has not made a public statement yet.

"Where is Ban Ki-moon? Why has he been silent so far?" Safavi asked IPS. "That is what the families of those in Ashraf are demanding."

Farhan Haq, a spokesperson for the secretary-general, told IPS that Ban fully supports the views of Pillay on the issue.

...was it worth it?

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/26-8

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/21/AR2010122106870_2.html

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/13/the_man_who_would_be_king?page=full

  

Conservatives are playing a dangerous game with the financial future of America and the World!

Republicans walk out of budget talks over taxes

By Richard Cowan and Andy Sullivan - Reuters - 1 hr 19 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republicans walked out of budget talks on Thursday, setting up a showdown between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner over how to extend U.S. borrowing and avoid a looming debt default.

Vice President Joe Biden and a handful of lawmakers had been working on a budget-cutting deal that would allow Congress to sign off on continued borrowing, but Republicans quit unexpectedly after saying the group had reached an impasse over tax increases sought by Democrats.

"It is time for the president to speak clearly and resolve the tax issue," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who had represented House Republicans in the talks. Republican Senator Jon Kyl also pulled out.

An agreement would give lawmakers political cover to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling before August 2, when the Treasury Department has said it will run out of money to pay the country's bills.

Default could occur if Congress does not act by then, which could push the United States back into recession and send markets plunging around the globe.

Obama will now probably have to hammer out a deal with Boehner, the top Republican in Washington, and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid -- the same trio that took the government to the brink of a shutdown in an earlier budget battle this spring.

"I think it's in the hands of the speaker and the president, and sadly, probably me," Reid said at a news conference. No initial meeting has been set, he said.

Biden said his group has always intended to hand the baton to Obama and Boehner.

"The next phase is in the hands of those leaders, who need to determine the scope of an agreement that can tackle the problem and attract bipartisan support," he said in a statement.

Boehner said talks could resume if Democrats took tax hikes off the table, but they showed no sign of backing off.

So far, the possibility of default has not affected bond markets as investors focus on other news and assume Washington will ultimately strike a deal -- probably at the last minute.

"This is going to look ugly for the next few weeks," said Greg Valliere, a political analyst for investors at Potomac Research Group.

DEAL NOT NECESSARILY OUT OF REACH

Obama and Boehner have tried to establish a personal rapport since this spring's budget battle. The two golfed together on Saturday and met at the White House on Wednesday.

Cantor, who was building a similar bond with Biden, gave no indication after Wednesday's session that talks had hit a wall.

His withdrawal caught Democrats by surprise, coming as Obama met with House Democratic leaders at the White House before the afternoon's scheduled negotiating session.

"It appears that Cantor has obviously had enough of these negotiations and Kyl followed suit, but there has been progress made. It's not as if nothing has happened," Reid said.

Negotiators had reached tentative agreement on more than $2 trillion in cuts covering wide swaths of the federal budget, according to an aide familiar with the talks, affecting health programs, annual spending, benefits like farm subsidies and tuition aid, and automatic limits on future spending.

But Democrats would not relent on taxes, the aide said.

Republicans have said from the outset that any tax increases will not pass the House. Democrats saw an opening, though, after many Senate Republicans supported a move to repeal a tax break for ethanol last week over the objections of anti-tax activists.

In recent sessions, Democrats had pressed to close a wide range of tax breaks, from oil and gas subsidies to breaks that benefit wealthy individuals.

REPUBLICANS MAY NOT HAVE THE VOTES

Republicans may not have enough votes to pass a deal through the House in any case, as many newly elected conservatives feel little urge to compromise.

That means Boehner may have to rely on Democratic votes, and Democrats will insist that tax increases be part of the deal, one lawmaker said.

"I think we walk away unless there's some revenue raisers," Democratic Representative Allyson Schwartz said at a breakfast event hosted by Third Way, a centrist think tank.

Cantor and Boehner may need to allow a debt-ceiling vote to fail before they can craft a compromise, budget expert Stan Collender said. That could provide a jolt to markets akin to the failed bank bailout vote of 2008, which caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to drop 800 points.

"There may need to be a negative market reaction to that vote to get Republicans to move from their current position," said Collender, a budget analyst with Qorvis Communications.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad warned that those sorts of tactics could lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in additional interest costs for the government to reflect the additional uncertainty of investing in U.S. debt.

One Democratic aide said Cantor recognized that tax increases would ultimately have to be part of any deal but that he did not want to be the one to say so.

"Cantor just threw Boehner under the bus," the aide said.

(Additional reporting by Kim Dixon and Donna Smith in Washington and Laura MacInnis in Fort Drum, N.Y.; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Your resistance is futile ...

You have meddled with the primary forces of nature, Mr Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear?

You think you merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tide and gravity. It is ecological balance.

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rands, rubles, pounds and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.

And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone.

Am I getting through to you, Mr Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their Councils of State? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, mini-max solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bye-laws of of business. The world is a business, Mr Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that ... perfect ... world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.

All necessities provided. All anxieties tranquilized. All boredom amused.

Egypt declines World Bank loan as incompatible with national interest | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today's News from Egypt

http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/469888
The government has declined a loan from the World Bank because it found the terms of the loan incompatible with the national interest, Egyptian Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Fayza Abul Naga said on Monday.

The minister added that the government would not accept conditions dictated by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, especially since the 18-day uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.



However, Abul Naga said the Saudi government has granted Egypt a loan of US$200 million to be directed to small and medium enterprises.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal said Egypt was wary of the United States’ recent offer of financial support, doubting possible ulterior motives behind it.

It also said Abul Naga had lodged a complaint with the US Embassy in Egypt, and warned of violating Egypt’s sovereignty by dictating conditions for loans. The complaint came in response to an announcement by the United States Agency for International Development that it would grant Egypt US$165 million to finance projects for education, civic activities and human rights.

Abul Naga objected to the agency announcing loans to Egypt without consulting competent Egyptian officials.

The Big Corporation's Tea Party

http://tnj2012.multiply.com/journal/item/83/We_Must_Not_Forget_the_Original_Intent_of_the_Boston_TEA_Party
"Perhaps the greatest irony of the Tea Party is that the Boston Tea Party was actually a revolt against corporate monopoly, not taxes on tea.

The British Crown used to tax commerce, which created a black market. The British East India Company complained to the Crown that tea smugglers were taking market share away from them so the Crown eliminated commerce taxes on tea, putting the black marketers out of business. It was they who threw the first shipment of TAX FREE tea into Boston Harbor."

FOCUS | 6 Billion "In Cash" Missing in Iraq

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/308-12/6266-focus--6-billion-qin-cashq-missing-in-iraq

Pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped US $100 bills arriving in Iraq in May of 2004. (photo: Scott Applewhite/AP)

6 Billion "In Cash" Missing in Iraq

By Liz Goodwin, The Lookout/Y!News

14 June 11

he Iraqi and US governments have been unable to account for a substantial chunk of the billions of dollars in reconstruction aid the Bush administration literally airlifted into the country. If the cash proves to have been stolen, the heist could represent "the largest theft of funds in national history," according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

The Times' description of how the billions of dollars entered the country is a must-read:

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that US officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

Special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction Stuart Bowen told the paper the missing $6.6 billion may be "the largest theft of funds in national history."

Iraqi officials say it was the US government's job to keep track of the funds, which were brought in as an emergency measure to keep basic infrastructure going after Saddam Hussein's ouster. House Government Reform Committee investigators found in 2005 evidence of "substantial waste, fraud and abuse in the actual spending and disbursement of the Iraqi funds."

Witnesses testified that millions of dollars were shoved into "gunnysacks" and disbursed to Iraqi contractors on pick-up trucks, with what seemed to be little financial controls or accounting on the part of the US government.

Berlusconi suffers humiliating referendum defeat - Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110613/wl_afp/italyenergynuclearpoliticsreferendum
ROME (AFP) – Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered a humiliating defeat on Monday in opposition-backed referendums to block nuclear power and abolish a law intended to give him legal immunity.



It was the embattled premier's second blow in less than a month after his People of Freedom party lost critical mayoral votes in Milan and Naples and even Berlusconi supporters were saying something needed to change quickly.

"The high turnout in the referendums shows a will on the part of citizens to participate in decisions about our future that cannot be ignored," Berlusconi said, after official data showed 57 percent of voters had taken part.

Turnout was of crucial importance since the referendums required participation of more than 50 percent in order to have legal force.

"The will of Italians is clear on all the subjects of this consultation. The government and parliament must now respond fully," Berlusconi said.

Final results are due later on Monday but early data showed crushing votes of more than 90 percent against the government in the four referendum questions -- one on nuclear, one on the immunity law and two on water privatisation.

The vote against government plans to resume a nuclear programme reflects popular unease about atomic energy in Europe after the Fukushima disaster in Japan and is likely to set back any prospects of nuclear power in Italy for decades.

"Italians have finally woken up and decided to take their destiny into their hands," said a jubilant Margherita Sina, 25, one of hundreds partying in the streets of Rome as people around her waved trade union and Greenpeace flags.

"This is huge! Italians have become more responsible," she said.

Sixteen-year-old Laura said: "It's the beginning of the end for Berlusconi, this really is the end of Berlusconi-ism."

Berlusconi did not vote and the government had encouraged its supporters to stay away but it switched to damage control mode as the scale of the defeat became clear, warning critics against making too much of the referendums.

Daniele Capezzone, a spokesman for the ruling party, said critics should not see "a meaning or a political effect" in the votes, while Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa said there would be "no effect on government policy".

But tensions clearly emerged with the Northern League party, the junior partner in the coalition that is critical to keeping Berlusconi in office.

"We got a slap in the face in the elections two weeks ago. Now at the referendums we've had another slap. I don't want getting slapped in the face to become a habit," said Roberto Calderoli, a Northern League minister.

Giuliano Ferrara, an influential talk show host and long-term Berlusconi supporter, said: "Something needs to change."

"Berlusconi and his ruling elite have decided not to change, to continue like this and I deeply and radically disagree."

Business daily Il Sole 24 Ore said this was the "most arduous" challenge for Berlusconi since his election victory in 2008.

Meanwhile Pier Luigi Bersani, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, said Berlusconi should resign. "This referendum was about the divorce between the government and the country," he said.

Anticipating the result of the vote earlier on Monday, Berlusconi said during a joint press conference with Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu: "We will have to commit strongly to the renewable energy sector."

"Following a decision being taken by the Italian people, Italy will probably have to say goodbye to the issue of nuclear power stations," he said.

Italy abandoned atomic energy with a referendum in 1987 after the Chernobyl disaster, but Berlusconi has made its reintroduction a major policy goal.

His government had argued that it would have slashed electricity bills, reduced Italy's energy dependency and been better for the environment.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, has said that a vote against nuclear power in Italy "could open a serious phase of reflection in other member states" of the European Union.

The vote against Berlusconi's partial immunity law was also being seen as a signal of disenchantment over the 74-year-old prime minister's legal woes.

Berlusconi is a defendant in ongoing three trials involving allegations of bribery, fraud, abuse of power and paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl.

The prime minister's popularity ratings have hit record lows this year after he came under investigation over his liaison with nightclub dancer "Ruby the Heart Stealer" and amid continued sluggish growth in the Italian economy.

Land Destroyer: The Globalists' Worst Nightmare

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/03/globalists-worst-nightmare.html
Can regional / national self-sufficiency effectively combat the negative effects of economic globalism? It seems that Thailand is in the vanguard of an idea whose time may have come.

Rats Multiply - U.S. Drug-War Policy Planting the Seeds of Civil-Society Destruction | | the narcosphere

http://cosmicrat.multiply.com/links/item/222/U.S._Drug-War_Policy_Planting_the_Seeds_of_Civil-Society_Destruction_the_narcosphere
The history of US treatment of our Latin American neighbors contains a long list of shameful and brutal actions and policies. Just in case anyone thinks we've reformed and everything is all right now, there are still the drug wars and all those leftover guns.

How Our Government Has Merged With Corporations

May 26, 2011  |  

The government of the United States is largely rented to corporations.

The 20th century was the bloodiest and most violent in human history. This led some countries to fascism - a system characterized by the state and large business becoming almost indistinguishable. The first decade of the 21st century suffers from that anti-democratic legacy.

The government of the United States, for example, is largely rented to corporations. Big business sends multiple thousands of lobbyists to Washington, DC, to buy favors and get their point of view across in Congress and the executive branch: The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the new war in Libya have been a boon to munitions manufacturers, "security" companies and private mercenary armies. They are part of a permanent war economy, making the US the world's sheriff.

This so-called "defense" has spawned America's largest businesses, besides being the mother of the military-industrial complex. One company, Lockheed Martin, gets more than $29 billion per year for making weapons for the Pentagon. Lockheed Martin also makes foreign policy for America.(1)

The financial meltdown of 2008 proved beyond reasonable doubt that the government is in the pockets of, in this case, banks "too large to fail." President Barack Obama, elected to redress the injustices of the George W. Bush administration, ditched his promises and ethics to bailout banking billionaires.

The BP poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 2010 was a consequence of BP making energy policy for the US government.

The federal government often sides with manufacturers of hazardous products. I know this from personal experience. I worked for 25 years for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has been manipulating science with the blowing of corporate wind and political interest.

The EPA nearly always is using science to cover up the hazardous and biocidal nature of American industry, including the poisoning of nature and humans by nuclear power plants, which are siblings of nuclear weapons.

This is happening not because we don't know the effects of nuclear power. We know too much, in fact. We know, for example, that uranium and plutonium, fueling both nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants, are toxic for almost an eternity. John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, who made contributions on the effects of radioactivity on humans and the environment and worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, California, called nuclear power "poisoned power."(2) Leonidas Petrakis, a former senior scientist and department chairman at Brookhaven National Laboratory, did nuclear scattering experiments at the Berkeley accelerator and, otherwise, is an expert on energy. In a personal note, he equaled "nuclear" to "insanity." Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician and former professor of medicine at Harvard, called her 1978 book "Nuclear Madness." She repeated that charge in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on March 30, 2011. Petrakis says it would take 250,000 years for an area contaminated by plutonium-239 to be safe again. This is why he dismisses as irresponsible any talk by "experts" or "nuclear hawks" recommending "glass encapsulation of the nuclear waste," storing it in salt caves in Nevada or New Mexico for 1,000 or more years. These nuclear advocates, he says, "prefer to ignore the scores of isotopes involved in nuclear waste (including Pu-239) and talk only about iodine-131, which has a half life of 8 days, and for which conveniently there is 'a pill' (as a society we love those pill solutions!)"

The reason behind the barbarism of manufacturing nuclear bombs and using bomb technology to boil water for electricity is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its efforts to legitimize the monster of the nuclear weapons. In addition, the owners of nuclear power plants influence politicians and scientists to support their lethal product.

In the same corrupt way, the EPA has been licensing toxic and cancer-causing farm chemicals that, essentially, poison our food and drinking water while causing harm and death to wildlife. These chemicals came out of the cauldron of WWII. Many are neurotoxins and many hurt our immune system, damaging the female animal more than the male. Some of these toxins castrate the male animal, including man. They also change the sex of animals, stopping their reproduction. And many of these pesticides injure or kill wildlife at extremely low amounts, contributing to a massive extinction of species, which is unprecedented in history.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation organization in San Francisco, pesticides are a "significant threat" to both endangered species and biological diversity. On January 19, 2011, the Center sued the EPA for its failure to protect endangered species: The wave of extinction decimating plants and animals, according to the Center, is the worst since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. Species become extinct at a rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate.

Pesticides are also pushing honeybees to the brink of extinction. Honeybees give us honey and pollinate one-third of our crops. And according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, pesticides kill on average 72 million birds every year.

The EPA's acts cause much destruction. Yet, in some measure, they fall within the context of the law. Indeed, the tragedy of a government department, EPA, "protecting public health and the environment" is that, in reality, a department with such an honorable and necessary mission is really protecting the profits of corporations, not public heath and the environment. Pesticides' vast impacts are nearly invisible because Americans have been brainwashed to consider pesticides as "normal" for farming as apple pie. The EPA does what Congress and the business of America has enshrined into law. For example, it legalizes America's unhealthy and hazardous food.

I call the food Americans eat "unhealthy and hazardous" because, unless it is certified organic, it is contaminated by legal and illegal poison residues. Just because the EPA approves so much poison in the food, that approval does nothing to lessen the toxic effects of the poison residues. According to EPA data from the 1970s, these residues change the nutrition of food and pose immediate or long-term health threats to those growing and consuming it. EPA researchers pointed out in the 1970s that farmers die from cancer at twice the rate of those living in the cities. That farmer death rate must be much higher now.

The EPA pushes these unethical policies because America's chemical and agribusiness corporations make huge profits from selling farmers and householders pesticides and fertilizers. For example, manufacturers of pesticides earn around $40 billion per year. In addition, the US Department of Agriculture and the country's 65 agricultural universities have made possible the near extinction of small family farmers for the sake of large farmers and giant agribusiness corporations. Such a massive crime leaves our academic mandarins undisturbed. I taught at one of those "land-grant universities," the University of Maryland, during 2003-2004. With the exception of a couple of my colleagues, the other "resource science" professors even refused to use words like "family farmer" or "sustainable agriculture." Agribusiness is their calling.

This undoing of rural America, and the inevitable ditching of public health and democracy did not happen overnight. Rather, after WWII, the Pentagon decided that, for national security purposes, the US had to side with the large farmers and business corporations large enough to support an empire.

Just like other government departments, the EPA also serves this empire, embracing the agenda of corporate America.

The latest demand of agribusiness is the genetic engineering of the food of America and the world for the corporate control of food. The EPA bought this scheme, knowing that it would exacerbate the pesticide effects of American agriculture. But genetically engineered food is hazardous to rats and risky to humans.(3) In addition, genetic engineering is sold as an elixir for human immortality, at least, that's the spin of the engineers fiddling with the very structure of life. Both the government and the wealthy fund such a nightmarish prospect. According to Spencer Stober and Donna Yarri, experts on biomedical sciences, genetic engineers don't dispel the fantasy of engineered humans living forever.(4)

In addition, the EPA approves the release of the toxic effluents of animal farms, machines and factories into the air and water of the country with the result of harming both public health and nature.

These machines and factories are also fueled by coal, petroleum and gas, the burning of which is causing global warming, a long-term calamity for the earth and her people. For the most part, it is industry that is the chief beneficiary of government policies and actions. We fail to call such merging of government and industry fascist, lest we feel shame for such a plunge in civilization and degeneracy in political organization.

This demands drastic rejection of current political ideologies fueling the running of government for millionaires and corporations. Business institutions that have become gigantic must be cut down to size, and their privileges, including fake treatment as if they were persons, withdrawn. We should choose honest people to represent us while we forbid any private money for their election. We have to demand our government return to the fundamental values of democracy and justice we inherited from the Greeks. Yes, democracy is difficult, but it is the only antidote to plutocracy and its subsidiary, fascism. Another Renaissance would do us good. In fact, it is necessary for our survival.

Footnotes:

1. William D. Hartung, "Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex," (New York: Nation Books, 2011).


2. John W. Gofman and Arthur R. Tamplin, "Poisoned Power: The Case Against Nuclear Power Plants before and after Three Mile Island," (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1979).


3. Jeffrey M. Smith, "Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods," (Fairfield, Iowa: Yes! Books, 2007).


4. Spencer Stober and Donna Yarri, "God, Science and Designer Genes," (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009).

TruthOut.org / By Evaggelos Vallianatos