What have we learned, if anything from the near meltdown at Fukushima?
The Germans learned something. They decided last week to close seven of its 17 nuclear plants. According to BBC, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that all reactors operational before 1980 would be taken offline, and safety checks carried out on the remaining plants.
Then there’s Russia. According to The New York Times, the Russian nuclear industry has profited handsomely by selling reactors abroad, mostly to developing countries. That includes China and India — whose insatiable energy appetites are keeping them wedded to nuclear power.
But here’s the kicker. Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, Rosatom, markets its reactors as safe — not despite Chernobyl, but because of it. Lessons learned and and all that jazz.
The safety pitch seems to be working. Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, himself flew to Belarus last week to sign the contract to build a plant in that country, worth $9 billion.
“I want to stress that we possess a whole arsenal of advanced technical resources to ensure stable, accident-free performance for nuclear plants,†Mr. Putin told journalists in Minsk, the Belarusian capital.
What about us? Have we learned anything here at home? ‘Fraid not. According to Bloomberg, even as the administration reviews all U.S. reactors following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that triggered radiation leaks from a crippled Japanese plant, Obama last week called nuclear power an “important part†of his energy agenda.
Obama’s 2012 budget calls for an additional $36 billion in U.S. loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants.
“The administration’s energy priorities are based solely on how best to build a 21st century, clean energy economy,†White House spokesman Clark Stevens said. “That policy is not about picking one energy source over another.â€
In other words, Americans who “hoped” Obama was somehow different are now painfully aware of the bill of goods they were sold in 2008. It’s business as usual in America and it will remain that way until we do something about it, and by doing something I don’t mean placing false hopes on a candidate. We, as citizens must do the heavy lifting, which begins with energy conservation. Nuclear supplies 20% of the nation’s power. The best way to minimize this insane threat is to reduce our power usage by 20% right now, today and everyday.
Rich says he wants to go long, that he no longer wants to feel the strain of shortening his thoughts to column length. Okay, but I’m more interested in what leads a man to write a column in the first place. Rich shares his thoughts on the matter:
For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage. I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap. Anyone could be a critic of the Bush administration. The challenge as a writer was to try to figure out why it governed the way it did — and how it got away with it for so long — and, dare I say it, to have fun chronicling each new outrage.
I can relate, as I too like to “stimulate debate” and “look for narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage.” That stage at present is full tilt. Japan’s nuclear plants are melting down; gas prices are on the rise at a time when Americans can least afford it; we’re waging two wars for Empire that we will not win; class warfare is spilling into the streets and state houses of the land; our drinking water is being poisoned by natural gas drilling; kids are dropping out of high school at alarming rates, and so on.
The kind of challenges we’re facing demand that we stand together to meet them. Will we?
Rich says it is foolhardy for an opinion writer to try to shape events. I don’t know. Someone’s got to shape events.
Pulitzer prize-wining journalist Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He’s also the author of Death of the Liberal Class and several other books.
I’ve been reading through some of his essays on TruthDig and finding that I generally agree with his assessments, but not with his recommended solutions, nor his alarmist tone.
Let’s take this passage on the 2012 election and how “the left” has nowhere to go:
Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope.
The inevitability of corporate slavery? Really? That’s the choice before the American people?
I totally agree that the Democratic Party is controlled by corporate interests. There’s really no debate there, as corporate lobbyists line the pockets of all lawmakers, not just the conservative ones.
Now, what do we do about it? Hedges wants people with core moral imperatives to lay their bodies on the line, and I’m sure there’s a place for that, but getting big money out of politics is the only way to shift the balance of power back to the people. If my voice is going to be equal the voice of Exxon-Mobile, then my contribution to candidates has to be equal, as well. Otherwise, Exxon-Mobile’s millions will be always be a million times more important.
I also question what Hedges and Nader mean by “the corporate state.” It’s too broad a statement, in my opinion. The great majority of Americans work for a corporation, and many of these corporations do great things for people. After all, corporations are nothing more than a group of people with a common commercial interest. It seems that the need to make dramatic statements to jar people from their sleepy stupor is more important to Hedges than being clear and accurate–a fact which strips some of the power away from his fiery rhetoric.
President Obama visited the Portland area on Friday. He used the opportunity to highlight an American company that’s big on innovation. He also said, “America has to out-build, and out-innovate, and out-educate and out-hustle the rest of the world.” That’s the path his administration hopes will help us “win the future.”
The President also made his weekly address to the nation from Intel’s campus in Hillsboro during his visit. Let’s listen.
Companies like Intel are proving that we can compete – that instead of just being a nation that buys what’s made overseas, we can make things in America and sell them around the globe. Winning this competition depends on the ingenuity and creativity of our private sector – which was on display in my visit today. But it’s also going to depend on what we do as a nation to make America the best place on earth to do business.
That last line is an interesting one to deliver in Oregon, a state that is widely regarded as being anti-business. Many articles have been written about the topic, but I think you can boil it down to the fact that Oregonians believe in regulating business. When you fail to regulate business, the greedy bastards take down your forests, foul your waterways and lop off the top of mountains for coal and other minerals. Ask someone from West Virginia what happens when you don’t regulate industry. Ask someone from Louisiana.
I like the loftiness of Obama’s stated goals. Hustle is an intangible, and it’s something we see in action everyday, especially in immigrant-owned small businesses. Maybe we can all tap our inner-immigrant and put a bit more hustle into our routines.
To out-innovate and out-build, we first must out-educate, and that costs money. Tax money, to be specific. Going to college today is an outrageous expense. If Obama is serious about his stated intentions, then he and his team need to wrestle away money wasted on corporate welfare and put that money into our schools and into students’ hands, so they can afford to attend.
I was pleased to learn last week that the administration’s new budget proposes to slash tax credits for the oil and gas industry, a move that will save $3.6 billion in fiscal year 2012 and a total of $46.2 billion during the next decade. Naturally, the gas and oil titans have the most powerful lobby in Washington, DC and those hired hands are now busy slapping backs and lining pockets up and down the halls of Congress to counter Obama’s cuts.
Does it not boggle your mind that the forces who make so much noise about social entitlements, fight to the death for corporate entitlements? It’s doublespeak and we the people need to know and reject doublespeak when we hear it. Republicans believe in small government is doublespeak. Small governments don’t fund imperialist wars. Small governments don’t build more prisons than schools. At the same time, I have plenty of complaints against the Democrats. Democrats are not the answer, you are the answer and I am the answer. We need a people-powered movement in these states.
Personally, I don’t care what your political stripes indicate, I care about what’s in your heart and in your mind. Is the promise of a better America one you’re willing to keep? If so, it’s time to believe in yourself and in your neighbors. It’s time to think on your feet, and time to dampen all the polar language and work together to advance our common cause. It’s not an abstract concept and there’s room for you in this solution. It may mean building a business or it may mean building houses for the poor. The point is find a way to contribute.
Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s economics editor, is in Davos, Switzerland this week, reporting from the World Economic Forum.
I don’t pretend to understand economics any more than I understand international politics, but I know enough to know I need to know more.
The rule is that America gets a free pass to run larger deficits, for longer, than anybody else. But you have to wonder – and everyone I speak to in Davos is wondering – how long America’s “exorbitant privilege” is going to last.
It took several decades, and two punishingly expensive wars, for the world to tire of holding sterling. But when they did, it changed British economic policy making forever. Indeed, we are still seeing the consequences today. Rightly or wrongly, the British government believes it cannot risk borrowing a lot more from international markets. The Americans know they have a lot more leeway.
They will have it for some time yet. But the lesson of sterling’s rise and fall is that if you run current account deficits long enough, and depreciate your currency far enough, the world will eventually stop giving you the benefit of the doubt. The biggest difference between Britain in 1945 and America now is that back then, there was a ready replacement for sterling, in the form of the dollar.
The word “empire” does not appear in the text above, but the concept of empire is certainly present. And as history shows, empire is not sustainable.
Meanwhile, President Obama delivered his State of the Union on Tuesday. Here he is saying, “We have to do more.” Roger that.
Representative Peter DeFazio, from Oregon’s 4th District, bravely faced down President Obama and the Republican Party yesterday. He wants a better deal for the American people and he’s willing to stick his neck out to get it.
DeFazio introduced a resolution yesterday to bring the GOP’s tax plan to a grinding halt. In a raucous meeting, the House Democratic Caucus rejected Obama’s comproÂmise with the GOP, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not bring the bill to the floor for a vote without changes.
DeFazio, in a telephone interview with The Register-Guard, said he was just trying to help the president keep his campaign promise of ending tax cuts on those whose income exceeds $250,000.
“We’re trying to give the president the opportunity to reclaim what he ran on,†DeFazio said.
DeFazio scoffed at the threat from Republicans that they would block the extension of unemployment benefits if the Bush tax cuts weren’t extended for two years. “They’re going to cut off unemployment benefits before Christmas? That’s a big bluff. If you are going to cut off benefits, hey, make my day. We’ll savage you,†he said.
The Bush Administration tax cuts are set to end by the end of this year, which means the extension needs to be approved by December 31st. This lame duck Congress is run by Democrats and they ain’t havin’ it, even at the urging of a Democratic President.
DeFazio, a native of Needham, Massachusetts, worked as a gerontologist before he took elected office. It’s safe to say he’s kicking it old school now.
Today in Washington, DC, Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal asked President Obama how he would respond to Democrats who think he’s compromised too much in agreeing on a two-year extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts. Obama responded forcefully, saying that the positions of such people on the left would result in getting nothing done, except having a “sanctimonious” pride in the purity of their own positions.
He has tried to be both pragmatist and progressive savior. And even when he stopped trying to be the savior after he was elected, he was at a certain level content to let supporters continue to project that persona on to him.
Today, he very clearly and loudly said: that savior persona is not me. I am the pragmatist. And you know what, I don’t have a whole lot of patience for the idealists. I share their ideals, but I don’t share their approach and I’m not going to get bogged down in recriminations over not living up to some abstract ideal.
Here’s the problem. When you compromise away what you stand for because it is the expedient thing to do, you’ve robbed yourself of the one thing that matters–your integrity.
I might add that Obama’s fiery defense of his need to be pragmatic in the face of mounting opposition makes for good C-SPAN material, but that’s about the only positive I can find in it. Republicans put a bumbling fool in the White House for eight years and proceeded to mow down the Constitution like an overgrown field–with ZERO compromise–but when the other team finally gets its chance, the highly educated, skilled orators end up looking like political buffoons.
I understand the need to get things done, but the fact is small steps in the right direction is not a winning defense for the Obama team. They better come up with something better and fast, or their feeble attempt at wielding real power is over.
Nobody expects the President or Ben Bernanke to speak honestly, as the truth would shatter an increasingly fragile status quo. But this reliance on artifice, half-truths and propaganda has a cost; people are losing faith in government, in all levels of authority, and in the Mainstream Media—and for good reason.
The marketing obsession with instant gratification and self-glorification has led to a culture of what I call permanent adolescence. Politicians who promise a pain-free continuation of the status quo are rewarded by re-election, and those who speak of sacrifice are punished. An unhealthy dependence on the State to organize and fund everything manifests in a peculiar split-personality disorder: people want their entitlement check and their corporate welfare, yet they rail against the State’s increasing power. You can’t have it both ways, but the adolescent response is to whine and cajole Mom and Dad (or the State) for more allowance and more “freedom.†But freedom without responsibility and accountability is not really freedom; it’s simply an extended childhood.
President Obama must be seeking re-election because here he is earlier today advocating for the continuation of the status quo:
I wish Obama wouldn’t concern himself with re-election and instead do the right thing for the country every day for two more years. But he won’t, because he’s stuck inside the two-party system, which is a prison of our own making. I’d like to think that one day we might break free of this prison, but to do so we will have to stop feeding the guards.
MGM, led by Republican activist and movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, produced three fake newsreels to attack Sinclair before election day, using shots from old movies and Hollywood actors. The newsreels sparked riots in theaters. Irving Thalberg later admitted producing the newsreels. “Nothing is unfair in politics,” he explained.
Just yesterday on Twitter I said, “politics is war,” which led to an interesting exchange with Chris O’Rourke.
As we know, there are all sorts of wars today. Culture wars, drug wars and very real and bloody wars. In all of them lives are at stake. That’s certainly true when we look at the war on poverty, which has been ongoing in America for generations.
Let’s hear from Upton Sinclair about the lives at stake during the Great Depression.
The “EPIC†(End Poverty in California) movement proposes that our unemployed shall be put at productive labor, producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labor certificates or whatever name you may choose to give to the paper employed. It asserts that the State must advance sufficient capital to give the unemployed access to good land and machinery, so that they may work and support themselves and thus take themselves off the backs of the taxpayers. The “EPIC†movement asserts that this will not hurt private industry, because the unemployed are no longer of any use to industry.
Ultimately, Sinclair lost the race to Frank F. Merriam. It’s now 76 years later and we’re still burdened by an inordinate number of people on the sidelines in America, and that’s no way to manage a city, state or nation. But who among us has the faintest clue about how to fix the mess that is the American economy? Sure entrepreneurs can and do create businesses and new jobs, but as Sinclair argues above, the unemployed are not aided by this.
At any rate, we’re 48 hours from another mid-term election and polls indicate that the Republicans will do well on Tuesday. Why will they do well? There are many reasons, one of which is the skilled use of advertising and the media by the Grand Old Party.
In the end, we can call today’s attack ads propaganda, but identifying them as such and rendering them meaningless and ineffective are not the same thing. As long as political propaganda works to get people elected, there will always be people of all political persuasions willing to employ it. Sure, it’s a sad commentary on our values as a nation, and all the lying and manipulation that goes on erodes the fabric of what’s good in our society. But the problem with lies is they’re not seen as lies by the people who retell them. For Loius B. Mayer and Karl Rove and the like, sure, they know the lies they tell, but the audience, sadly, isn’t that discerning.
