"Harvey Wasserman" - Can We Stop the Next Fukushima Times 10,000?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/13

Published on Tuesday, September 13, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Harvey Wasserman

The horrible news from Japan continues to be ignored by the western corporate media.

Students wear masks at an elementary school outside of the 20-km (12 mile) radius zone from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Minami Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, September 8. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

Fukushima's radioactive fallout continues to spread throughout the archipelago, deep into the ocean and around the globe---including the US. It will ultimately impact millions, including many here in North America.

The potentially thankful news is that Fukushima's three melting cores may have not have melted deep into the earth, thus barely avoiding an unimaginably worse apocalyptic reality.

But it's a horror that humankind has yet to fully comprehend.

As Fukushima's owners now claim its three melted reactors approach cold shutdown, think of this:

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"Janet McGurty and David Sheppard" - Chevron Confirms Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/14

Published on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 by Reuters

by Janet McGurty and David Sheppard

REUTERS - A leak from a shallow water crude oil pipeline in the Main Pass Area of the Gulf of Mexico has led Chevron to shut down its offshore Louisiana Main Pass pipeline network, the company said on Tuesday.

A file picture of Chevron Canada oil rig. A leak from a shallow water crude oil pipeline in the Main Pass Area of the Gulf of Mexico has led Chevron to shut down its offshore Louisiana Main Pass pipeline network, the company said on Tuesday. (Photo: File, Postmedia News)

Chevron has also shut its Cypress line, the company said.

About 15,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil production was shut in due to the pipeline leak, Chevron said. The company said late on Tuesday it will resume partial production within 24 hours.

Chevron did not reply to several requests for additional information about the leak and its operations in the Main Pass Area.

Carol Fagot, a spokeswoman at the Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE), said the agency was "aware of the report and looking into it," without offering further details.

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"Bernie Sanders"- Is Poverty a Death Sentence?

Published on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/14-6

The crisis of poverty in America is one of the great moral and economic issues facing our country. It is very rarely talked about in the mainstream media. It gets even less attention in Congress. Why should people care? Many poor people don't vote. They certainly don't make large campaign contributions, and they don't have powerful lobbyists representing their interests

Here's why we all should care. There are 46 million Americans -- about one in six -- living below the poverty line. That's the largest number on record, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Census Bureau. About 49.9 million Americans lacked health insurance, the report also said. That number has soared by 13.3 million since 2000.

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"Paul Harris"- The Decline and Fall of the American Middle Class

Published on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/13/american-middle-class-poverty

The heart of our political malaise is that the middle class, so long a powerhouse of US prosperity, is being crushed as never before

No one can accuse the candidates on stage at Monday's Republican debate of not discussing a broad range of topics. They talked about big issues like social security, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy independence, repealing healthcare reform and the need for job creation. And they talked about small issues for political point-scoring: like HPV vaccines for girls.The Consumer Hourglass Theory has been coined by Citibank to describe the new corporate strategy of marketing to high- and low-income earners but ignoring the squeezed middle. (Image: Corbis)

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"Dire Warning Over Arctic Sea Ice Melt"

Sea-ice coverage across the Arctic Ocean has dwindled to its second-lowest level since satellite records started in 1979, the National Snow and Ice Data Centre said, days after another study said ice melt was at its worst levels ever.

Areas of the Arctic with at least 15 per cent sea-ice as of Saturday totalled 1.68 million square miles, slightly above the record-low of 1.61 million square miles recorded in 2007.

Yet to be determined is whether the sea-ice cover will be the lowest for the year. Annual minimums are usually reached around mid-September.

"We're getting close, but there's still the potential for further loss of ice," said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre.

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"Mike Davis"- What the Future Will Remember About America’s Decline and Fall

Posted on September 13, 2011, Printed on September 13, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175440/

1. Twin Towers

Two years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most haunted building in the world.  There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.

Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Condé Nast publishing has signed the biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where 658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001.

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"William Rivers Pitt"- The Cult of Death

Tuesday 13 September 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/cult-death/1315937077

Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

- Matthew 25:40 (King James)

Trying to figure out what this whole "Tea Party" phenomenon is all about is a lot like trying to peer into the bottom of a muddy pool. The "mainstream" news media has accepted them as a legitimate, powerful force in American politics, as evidenced by CNN's so-called "Tea Party Debate" for the Republican presidential candidates on Monday night. A group that did not exist three years ago suddenly has enough clout to rate a television banner and a chunk of prime-time coverage.

But who are these people, really?

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"William Pfaff"- How to Save the United States and Israel From Themselves

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_to_save_the_united_states_and_israel_from_themselves_20110914/

Posted on Sep 13, 2011

Most Americans would likely agree that the main shock delivered to Americans and the American government by the 9/11 attacks was that of vulnerability. Another such shock is impending. It is the national vulnerability that will be revealed this month by the American veto of a Palestinian demand for full United Nations membership.

During the century and a half preceding 9/11, Americans enjoyed national and individual invulnerability to devastating foreign attack, unlike the people of any other major nation. Much has been made in recent years of how nuclear dread lay over the land in the 1950s. My own experience was that even the Cuban Missile Crisis was not what it subsequently was made out to have been. I am sure that the people actually making decisions in Washington quaked in their boots and prayed, which is why nothing happened. The menace was on the one hand so great that there was nothing to do about it (crouching under a table or possession of a shovel notwithstanding), but on the other hand no one in power was so stupid as to initiate a nuclear attack.

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Number of Uninsured Climbs to Highest Figure Since Passage of Medicare, Medicaid

Published on Tuesday, September 13, 2011 by Physicians for a National Health Program

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/september/number-of-uninsured-climbs-to-highest-figure-since-passage-of-medicare-medicaid

50 million uninsured shows urgency of enacting single-payer Medicare for all: national doctors group

Official estimates by the Census Bureau showing an increase of about 1 million in the number of Americans without health insurance in 2010 – to a 35-year high of 49.9 million persons, or 16.3 percent of the population, under the bureau’s revised calculation method – underscore the urgency of going beyond the Obama administration’s federal health law and swiftly implementing a single-payer, improved Medicare-for-all program, spokespersons for Physicians for a National Health Program said today.

"Tragically, we know that the new figures of uninsured mean a preventable annual death toll of about 50,000 people -- that's about one death every 10 minutes," said Dr. Garrett Adams, president of PNHP, a nationwide organization of 18,000 physicians. Employment-based coverage continued to decline. The bureau said 55.3 percent of Americans were covered by employment-based plans in 2010, down from 56.1 percent in 2009. It was the eleventh consecutive year of decline, from 64.2 percent in 2000.

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Number of Americans in Poverty Hits Record High

Published on Tuesday, September 13, 2011 by Agence France Presse

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/13-3

The US poverty rate rose in 2010 to 15.1 percent, the highest rate since 1993, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday in another sign of a sputtering economy following a deep recession.

The report showed a sharp increase in poverty from 14.3 percent in 2009, and a fourth consecutive rise in the number of people below the poverty threshold, to 46.2 million.

The number of people in poverty was the highest since data collection began in 1959, although the rate was 7.3 percentage points lower than in 1959.

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