"Staff Writers" - Traces of Japan nuclear fallout in California rainwater

by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) Sept 21, 2011

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Traces_of_Japan_nuclear_fallout_in_California_rainwater_999.html

Low levels of radioactivity showed up in rainwater in northern California two weeks after the Japan nuclear disaster in March but soon returned to normal, said a US study out Wednesday.

The detected levels of radioactive isotopes cesium, iodine, and tellurium were very small and posed no risk to the public, according to the findings of research funded by the US Departments of Energy and Homeland Security.

Rainwater was collected in the San Francisco Bay area cities of Berkeley, Oakland, and Albany from March 16 to 26, said the report in the online journal PloS (Public Library of Science) ONE.

"The first sample that showed elevated radioactivity was collected on March 18th, and levels peaked on March 24th before returning to normal," said study led by professor Eric Norman in the department of nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

The study also noted that "similar gamma ray counting measurements were performed on samples of weeds collected in Oakland and on vegetables and milk sold commercially in the San Francisco Bay area."

Some of the same fission products detected in rainwater were found in the milk and produce samples, also at a level that posed no risk to the public, it said.

On March 11, a record 9.0 earthquake and tsunami killed about 20,000 people along the coast of Japan and sparked nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima-Daichi plant.

The nuclear plant was sent into meltdown after its cooling systems were swamped by the waves, sending radiation into the air, sea and food chain in the world's worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl.



"Robert Scheer" - Murder Is Good Politics, Bad Justice

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/murder_is_good_politics_bad_justice_20110922/

Posted on Sep 22, 2011

By Robert Scheer

I don’t know if Troy Davis was innocent, but I do know that the evidence for demanding a re-examination of his conviction, including the recanted testimony of most of the witnesses against him, was overwhelming. But of course that is now beside the point, which is exactly what is so wrong about the use of the death penalty. No matter what evidence of innocence might be produced in the future, it is of consequence no longer.

That is a compelling argument against the death penalty—no room for correction—but there are others. The most egregious argument for capital punishment is the claim that the finality of officially condoned killing is a necessary guarantor of civilized order. Egregious because it is not possible to make that case without explaining why most of the democratic societies that we admire shun the death penalty as contrary to their most deeply held values. 

Or is it China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen, which, along with the United States, led the world in government executions, that we most admire? There is something stunningly disgraceful about the company we keep on this issue.

As Amnesty International—the world’s premier human rights organization, which deserves high marks for its anti-death penalty campaign—points out, more than two-thirds of the world’s nations have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. I defy anyone to compare the list of countries that have retained the death penalty with those that have abolished it and then conclude that it serves a needed purpose.

It is obvious from the experience of those nations without the death penalty and our own 17 states that have banned capital punishment that this barbaric custom is not a necessary, let alone efficient, means for ensuring public safety. Due process in the United States, which claims to have an enlightened legal system, requires death penalty procedures that are costlier than appropriate incarceration.

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"Jesse Jackson" - We Ignore Poverty, But It Is On the Rise

Published on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 by the Chicago Sun-Times

http://www.suntimes.com/news/jackson/7750396-452/we-ignore-poverty-but-it-is-on-the-rise.html

by Jesse Jackson

Poor people are invisible in our nation’s capital. Republicans defend the affluent, calling them “job creators,” Democrats champion the middle class and those boldest stand with “working families.” The poor go without mention.

The US has the highest poverty rate among developed countries.Yet the most recent census reveals that a stunning one in six Americans lives in poverty, more than 46 million, the highest number since the government began keeping track. Poverty is rising across all races and all regions.

The Great Recession is the immediate cause. Twenty-five million people are in need of full-time work; 49 million go without health insurance. A good many of the poor have jobs, but receive too little pay to lift their family up from poverty. But poverty was rising even before the latest economic collapse; the middle class has been losing ground for more than 30 years.

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"Takashi Hirose" - What TEPCO and the Media are Hiding

September 21, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/21/what-tepco-and-the-media-are-hiding/

by TAKASHI HIROSE

When did the radiation start to leak from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and how far has it spread?

About this our greatest interest, the Japanese Government announced nothing for several days (at least until March 17) after the earthquake occurred on March 11, 2011.  They just described the facts saying they “….happened” in the past tense, explaining neither the cause of the explosion nor its mechanism. They never talked about expectations of danger. What is “the worst scenario” that this nuclear accident might lead to? A reporter asked this of Edano Yukio, Chief Cabinet Secretary, at a news conference, but whether because Edano couldn’t answer or didn’t want to, he said nothing clearly.

Like the government, most of the media, rather than informing us of the dangers posed by this accident, kept claiming groundlessly that there was none.  The stock phrase used by both Edano and the TV “experts” – “no immediate effects to health” – means what?  That radiation effects start one year or 10 years later?  If the radiation was to have “immediate effects”, that would be a horror.  People would be dropping dead in the streets of acute radiation sickness as they did after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But that is not what we are talking about. The question is whether radiation taken into children’s bodies is really safe.

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"Alexander Cockburn" - Is Fascism Coming to America? And If So, Dressed as What?

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/16/is-fascism-coming-to-america-and-if-so-dressed-as-what/

But first, a simple rule for killers: If you are going to murder someone in the United States, don’t try to get the job done in Texas. Keep your captive alive in the car till New Mexico, which recently banned the death penalty, or press on to California, which retains the death penalty but makes available very large sums of state money – potentially, hundreds of thousands of dollars — for a capable death penalty defense.

That’s enough to hire good investigators, lawyers and expert witnesses who can spend many years on the case — first the trial and then the penalty phase and then the appeals process, which can go on for decades. California currently has 648 prisoners on death row in San Quentin, and since 1976, it has managed to execute only 13, just enough to keep people on their toes.

An indigent person charged with murder in the state of Texas, however, can count on maybe $500 for a court-appointed attorney to pay for special expenses. Yet the cost of importing an expert witness, who will be charging transportation, hotel and a fat fee, easily can exceed $10,000.

Business is correspondingly brisk in the lethal injection chamber in Huntsville, Texas. There are currently 413 on death row, and at the time of writing, 475 have been executed since 1976, 235 of them during Rick Perry’s decade-long stint as governor.

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"JA Myerson" - Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Other Right Wingers Want to Turn Back the Clock to 1900 -- What Was Life Like Back Then?

By J.A. Myerson, AlterNet
Posted on September 22, 2011, Printed on September 23, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152397/ron_paul%2C_rick_perry_and_other_right_wingers_want_to_turn_back_the_clock_to_1900_--_what_was_life_like_back_then

Wednesday's 230-195 vote in the GOP-controlled house against Speaker John Boehner's special funding measure to keep the government running past September 30th showed how far the far-right of the already far-right Republican Party will push a principle. They refuse to pass the bill (containing much-needed disaster relief, which is meager enough that the Democrats largely declined to vote for the bill) without deeper budget cuts written in. Boehner will have to rewrite the thing either to placate recalcitrant Democrats, intent on helping the vulnerable, or recalcitrant Republicans, intent on depriving the government of the means to help the vulnerable. One wonders what the odds are regarding his decision.

Weeks earlier, the destruction wrought by Hurricane Irene had provided an excellent opportunity to examine the real-life implications of arguments over the size of government in relation to the quality of liberty. Conservatives have always held that a government’s growth implies freedom’s decline and vice versa, but disaster relief has historically been an area where that formulation acquires the flavor of angels dancing on pinheads: when Americans are suffering and their local communities are ill-equipped to mitigate their despair, the federal government has routinely stepped in with aid. 

But this time around, the libertarian populism exemplified by the Tea Party took center stage. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) at first insisted the debt situation was so dire that disaster relief funds would have to come from elsewhere in the budget.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) insinuated that the deaths and destruction from North Carolina to Vermont were God’s way of alerting us to his will that America “rein in the spending.”

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"ScienceDaily" - One Million More U.S. Children Living in Poverty Since 2009, New Census Data Shows

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110922152631.htm

ScienceDaily (Sep. 23, 2011) — Between 2009 and 2010, one million more children in America joined the ranks of those living in poverty, bringing the total to an estimated 15.7 million poor children in 2010, an increase of 2.6 million since the recession began in 2007, according to researchers from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

Furthermore, the authors estimate that nearly 1 in 4 young children -- those under age 6 -- now live in poverty. "It is important to understand young child poverty specifically, as children who are poor before age 6 have been shown to experience educational deficits, and health problems, with effects that span the life course," the researchers said.

To evaluate the number of children now living in poverty, researchers focused on two time periods -- change since 2007, as the nation entered the recession, and change since 2009, as the recession was ending. They also looked at young children -- children under 6 years old -- living in poverty as well as national poverty rates for all children under 18.

Nationally, the number of all children living in poverty increased from 14.7 million in 2009 to 15.7 million in 2010. In 2007, 13.1 million children were living in poverty nationally.

Since 2007, 38 states have seen a significant increase in child poverty. Mississippi has the highest percentage of children living in poverty at 32.5 percent, followed by the District of Columbia (30.4 percent) and New Mexico (30 percent). New Hampshire has the lowest percentage of children living in poverty (10 percent), followed by Connecticut (12.8 percent) and Alaska (12.9 percent).

Overall, the South has the highest rates of child poverty at an estimated 24.2 percent, and the Northeast has the lowest rates at an estimated 17.8 percent. In addition, 28.7 percent of children in urban areas and 25.4 percent of children in rural places now live in poverty, significantly higher than the 16.1 percent in suburban areas.

Nationally, the number of young children, those under 6 years old, living in poverty increased from 5.7 million in 2009 to 5.9 million in 2010, with 24.8 percent of young children now poor. In the South, 27.9 percent of young children live in poverty, followed by 24.1 percent in the Midwest, 23.4 percent in the West, and 20.6 percent in the Northeast.

Young children living in the rural South have been the hardest hit, with more than 1 in 3 of the region's rural young children now living in poverty. "Rural poverty is particularly striking in this region, where nearly 36 percent of children under age 6 were poor," the researchers said.

The research was conducted by Jessica Bean, vulnerable families research associate at the Carsey Institute; Beth Mattingly, director of research on vulnerable families at the Carsey Institute and research assistant professor of sociology at UNH; and Andrew Schaefer, a doctoral student in sociology at UNH and research assistant at the Carsey Institute.



"Paul Craig Roberts" - America and Europe, Saving the Rich and Losing the Economy

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, September 25, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26769

Economic policy in the United States and Europe has failed, and people are suffering.
Economic policy failed for three reasons: (1) policymakers focused on enabling offshoring corporations to move middle class jobs, and the consumer demand, tax base, GDP, and careers associated with the jobs, to foreign countries, such as China and India, where labor is inexpensive; (2) policymakers permitted financial deregulation that unleashed fraud and debt leverage on a scale previously unimaginable; (3) policymakers responded to the resulting financial crisis by imposing austerity on the population and running the printing press in order to bail out banks and prevent any losses to the banks regardless of the cost to national economies and innocent parties.
Jobs offshoring was made possible because the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in China and India opening their vast excess supplies of labor to Western exploitation. Pressed by Wall Street for higher profits, US corporations relocated their factories abroad. Foreign labor working with Western capital, technology, and business know-how is just as productive as US labor. However, the excess supplies of labor (and lower living standards) mean that Indian and Chinese labor can be hired for less than labor’s contribution to the value of output. The difference flows into profits, resulting in capital gains for shareholders and performance bonuses for executives.

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"Progressive Radio Network Host Danny Schechter, Fridays @ 1pm(EDT)" - ISRAEL AND TURKEY, FRIENDS NO MORE

The first of several News Dissector Reports From Istanbul.
By Danny Schechter
Author of the Crime of Our Time

ISTANBUL TURKEY, September 19:  Let me begin with shvitz, a Yiddish term I believe that refers to special baths.

When the hotel I was staying at in Istanbul advertised that guests were welcome to enjoy the Turkish Bath in their basement, I took them up on it.  There were two other blondish guys in their birthday suits in the small room sweltering in the small room when I got there. They were drinking beer and conversing in a strange language I later identified as Swedish.

I was in town to speak at a session on Internet freedom at the 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2011) at Sabanci Center. They were there, as I slowly learned as engineers loaned out to the America’s Westinghouse Corporation to build some nuclear plants in Turkey. Apparently, they were to have been built by the Tokyo Electric company that now has a nuclear disaster of their own on their hands. They were either fired or quit the job in Turkey.

It was something about fears about safety and ongoing risks. Japan is out; the American nuclear industry is in.

So now these shvitzing Swedes have a new job in a country they don’t know much about and also have, as they revealed to me, many prejudices and non-nuclear fears about.

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"Chaz Valenza" - Occupy Wall Street: Day 9 - 200+ Arrested - MSM Finally Wake-up

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Occupy-Wall-Street-Day-9-by-Chaz-Valenza-110924-668.html

September 25, 2011

By Chaz Valenza

LINK: Don't Stop - 13 Things You Can Do to Support OWS NOW!

Yesterday between 121 and 200 protesters were arrested when a peaceful march of approximately 2,000 headed to Union Square to spread the word about their occupation for emancipation from a corrupt economic and financial system.  The events made news in many national MSM publications.

Daily News: MSM Blinks Coverage in Major National Press by subversionistic

Box Score:

OWS Protesters Arrested: 121 - 200 (?)

Wall Street Banksters Arrested: 0

Those who participated in the march uptown describe NYPD actions to stop their progress with police cars and metal barricades.   At each check-point the marchers simply changed directions or went around and even over the obstacles.

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