"Bill Blum" - Commencement Day for a Lost Generation

Posted on Jun 22, 2011

By Bill Blum

More than 1.7 million students graduated from four-year colleges across the country over the past two months. Along with their parents, all have a story about what they took from their commencement ceremonies, and all have a story about what they expect once they enter our sorry excuse for a job market.

My parental story unfolded as the morning fog rolled away and sunlight streamed across the blue-gray expanse of Monterey Bay. I sat down for breakfast with my wife, oldest son Max and youngest offspring Sam, who would be donning the cap and gown that afternoon at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Our waiter, a young man about Sam’s age, attentively refilled our coffee cups and carefully recorded our orders. I breached the normal customer-server barrier and asked if he, too, was connected with the University of California. “I graduated last year,” he answered. “Philosophy major. Berkeley.” He gave us a knowing smile, wished us a great day and moved on to another table. I opened my wallet and left him an oversized tip. Despite our having taking out a personal loan and having scrimped on everything from cable TV to wintertime heating to help finance Sam’s education, this was no time to get frugal.

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'Robert Scheer" - Bill Clinton’s Legacy of Denial

Posted on Jun 21, 2011

By Robert Scheer

Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that’s the case, or he wouldn’t have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president. 

Endorsing the Republican agenda of financial industry deregulation, reversing New Deal safeguards, President Clinton pursued policies that in the long run created more damage to the American economy than any other president since Herbert Hoover, whose tenure is linked to the Great Depression. Now, in his Newsweek piece, Clinton has the effrontery to once again revive his 1992 campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid,” as the article’s title without any sense of irony, let alone accountability. But that has always been the man’s special gift—to rise above, and indeed benefit from, the messes he created.

His list of safe nostrums—painting tar-surface roofs white and seeking more efficient solar and battery production—to be featured at his lavishly funded Clinton Global Initiative conference in Chicago next week is vintage Clinton hype. All of those solutions are of the win/win sort that he loved to ballyhoo as president; who in his or her right mind would be against green job creation? But that hardly speaks to a crisis in which, as was reported Tuesday, the housing meltdown continues unabated as the toxic mortgages sold and packaged by the leading banks and investment houses clog the real estate market, destroying consumer confidence and hobbling job creation.

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"Michael Payne" - Heed the Warning Signs; America is Edging Ever Closer to a Societal Implosion

June 21, 2011

By michael payne

Many millions of Americans are currently experiencing intense, unrelenting stress and feelings of despair and futility as they try to cope with a myriad of personal problems largely brought on by this nation's economic crisis. They are not unlike the millions of people in the Middle East that find themselves caught up in protests and violent civil disobedience; in fact they have one thing very much in common with them.

And that is that humans, no matter the nation or the culture, living under these kinds of extremely stressful conditions of despair and hopelessness, will eventually reach a breaking point when they have had all that they can take and they just can't take anymore; and then they react. Americans haven't reached that point, at least not yet. But conditions are continuing to deteriorate and many signs now indicate that a societal implosion is looming on America's horizon.

What we're talking about is an inward collapse of this society and its institutions. What exact form this collapse would take, how severe and far reaching it might be, and what it might do to this nation and its people is difficult to predict. But it's not the least bit farfetched to think that, at some point in the not too distant future, the American people will reach that breaking point and there will be a violent societal reaction.

Let's consider when that might happen and what would trigger such a reaction:

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Associated Press - AP IMPACT: Tritium leaks found at many nuke sites

Associated Press, June 21, 2011

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_aging_nukes_part2

BRACEVILLE, Ill. – Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.

Tritium, which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 sites, according to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission records reviewed as part of the AP's yearlong examination of safety issues at aging nuclear power plants. Leaks from at least 37 of those facilities contained concentrations exceeding the federal drinking water standard — sometimes at hundreds of times the limit.

While most leaks have been found within plant boundaries, some have migrated offsite. But none is known to have reached public water supplies.

At three sites — two in Illinois and one in Minnesota — leaks have contaminated drinking wells of nearby homes, the records show, but not at levels violating the drinking water standard. At a fourth site, in New Jersey, tritium has leaked into an aquifer and a discharge canal feeding picturesque Barnegat Bay off the Atlantic Ocean.

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"Joe Giambrone" - Nuclear Nightmare Worsens

It's worse, a lot worse.  The lies told by TEPCO and the Japanese government are but the tip of the iceberg.  More than 80% of the Japanese people distrust anything their government says about Fukushima.  Shinbun news reports on the propaganda:

"The government has been trying to stress at home and abroad the safety of nuclear power plants ahead of an International Atomic Energy Agency ministerial meeting scheduled to start Monday."

It seems the new (and quite laughable) message of safety is designed to get all those shut down reactors back on-line in Japan, except for the destroyed plants obviously.  The cryptic reference to the IAEA is curious.  Why anyone cares what the IAEA wants is beyond me.

For those interested in following the horror show enenews.com reposts articles, many of them translated from the original Japanese. 

Tokyo now features "hot spots" of significant radiation.  Sewage slag containing "170,000 Bequerels/kilogram" radioactivity has been detected and recycled into building materials!  Soil in Koto Ward of Tokyo measured "2,300 Bq/kg." 

A report by Bloomberg tells of soil samples about 25 kilometers to the northwest of the Fukushima plant, "with radiation from Cesium-137 exceeding 5 million becquerels per square meter."  Other test sites 30km from the plant, "showed radiation exceeding 1.48 million becquerels per square meter."

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"Ron Freeman" - Second Nebraska Nuke Plant Declares "Unusual Event"

At 4:10 AM, Sunday, 19 June 2011, the Cooper Nuclear Power Plant near Brownsville, NE. declared an "Unusual Event" due to rising flood waters along the Missouri River.  (NRC # 46969) 1

The Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant declared an "Unusual Event" on 06 June 2011,  due to rising flood waters.  (NRC # 46929) This plant is located about 18 miles north of Omaha, an urban population area of some 800,000 people.  It is currently in "Cold Shutdown" with no production of electricity.  It was shut down in April for refueling and never restarted due to Missouri River flood conditions.  The reactor is reported to be at 200 degrees with only normal atmospheric pressure.  This is a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR).

The Cooper Plant is in service and operating at or near 100% capacity.  It has not shut down due to the rising flood waters.  Cooper is a Boiling Water Reactor, manufactured by General Electric (BWR-4) with a Mark I Containment System.  Sound familiar?  Think "Fukushima".

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"Rania Khalek" - 5 WikiLeaks Revelations Exposing the Rapidly Growing Corporatism Dominating American Diplomacy Abroad

One of the most significant scourges paralyzing our democracy is the merger of corporate power with elected and appointed government officials at the highest levels of office.  Influence has a steep price-tag in American politics where politicians are bought and paid for with ever increasing campaign contributions from big business, essentially drowning out any and all voices advocating on behalf of the public interest. 

Millions of dollars in campaign funding flooding Washington's halls of power combined with tens of thousands of high-paid corporate lobbyists and a never-ending revolving door that allows corporate executives to shuffle between the public and private sectors has blurred the line between government agencies and private corporations.  

This corporate dominance over government affairs helps to explain why we are plagued by a health-care system that lines the pockets of industry executives to the detriment of the sick; a war industry that causes insurmountable death and destruction to enrich weapons-makers and defense contractors; and a financial sector that violates the working class and poor to dole out billions of dollars in bonuses to Wall Street CEO's. 

The implications of this rapidly growing corporatism reach far beyond our borders and into the realm of American diplomacy, as in one case where efforts by US diplomats forced the minimum wage for beleaguered Haitian workers to remain below sweatshop levels.

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"Richard Black" - World's oceans in 'shocking' decline

20 June 2011 Last updated at 08:24 ET

Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13796479

The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.

In a new report, they warn that ocean life is "at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history".

They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised.

The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity.

The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.

Its report will be formally released later this week.

"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.

"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."

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"Financial Times" - Trades reveal China shift from dollar

(FT) -- China began diversifying away from the US dollar in earnest in the first four months of this year, most likely by buying far more European government debt than US dollar assets, according to estimates from Standard Chartered Bank.

China's foreign exchange reserves expanded by around $200bn in the first four months of the year, with three-quarters of the new inflow invested abroad in non-US dollar assets, the bank estimated.

"It certainly appears that China's finally following through on its policy to diversify its foreign reserve holdings away from the US dollar," said Stephen Green, the bank's chief China economist.

For over six years, Beijing has continued to accumulate US government debt even as officials insisted they wanted to reduce the weighting of US dollar assets in reserves, which exceed US$3,000bn. Between December 2007 and March this year, China's foreign exchange reserves doubled to $3,044bn and over that time most analysts believe the proportion of US dollar assets remained relatively steady at between 60 and 70 per cent of the total.

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"Irish Weather Online" - Number Of Recorded Earthquakes Rises Sharply

http://www.irishweatheronline.com/news/earthquakesvolcanos/number-of-recorded-earthquakes-rises-sharply/20688.html

2011 is on target to record the largest number of earthquakes in a single year for at least 12 years.

Research by Irish Weather Online, using data from the US Geological Survey (USGS), has found that earthquake activity (5.0-9.9 magnitude) from 01 January to 19 June 2011 is already exceeding the total annual seismic activity for the years 2001, 2002 and 2003.  2011’s total number of recorded earthquakes is also expected to exceed the most seismically active year of the past 12 years, 2007.

A total of 1,445 earthquakes, ranging in magnitude from 5.0 to 9.9, have been recorded in the year up to 19 June. The total number of earthquakes recorded globally for the entire of 2007 was 2,270.

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