Americans need to occupy K Street too: Seoul's 1% spends millions on K Street South Korea Lobby (& US campaign contributions?) for KORUS

I wish the Occupy Wall Street movement would understand this is the street they need to focus on…

The street that passes the money from the corporations to the politicians…

I understand they are going to protest there today…this is the protest I would like to see take hold.

Obama promised to reign in K street and has done nothing…it is not the $20 gifts that the people are objecting to. It is things like this article is about.

Shut down K street all together.

BY jb on 10/06/2011 at 07:25 (Comment at "Trade deals were cash cow for K Street" by Kevin Bogardus, 10/10/11, The Hill)

It's not just the 1% at Wall Street that 99% of ordinary Americans are up against...

They are also up against the foreign 1% represented by K Street lobbyists. South Korean corporate interests have spent millions on K Street lobbyists since 2006 to push through a free trade deal opposed by the majority of U.S. and South Korean citizens (family farmers, labor rights, environmentalists, human rights and consumer advocates).

Kevin Bogardus' Oct. 10, 2011 "Trade deals were cash cow for K Street" published at The Hill on Oct. 10, 2011 charts some of the behind-the-scenes manipulation of the U.S. government by foreign lobbies (of course U.S. corporations and banks do the same overseas):

The Korean government was the biggest spender among the three, with close to $6.3 million spent on lobbying and PR from 2006 into 2011.

Not included in the Hill’s analysis was lobbying and PR spending recorded in Justice records by any private groups — such as the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, a quasi-governmental agency — or government agencies not connected to the trade agreements.

Opponents of the trade deals are still lobbying hard against the agreements and said there will be nothing to celebrate if the president signs them.

“With the projections that hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers will lose their jobs from the pending trade pacts, it’s hard to work up too much sympathy for the relative handful of lobbyist contracts that may expire after Congress votes on the deals,” said Todd Tucker, research director for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch...

In a July 2010 letter to the Korean ambassador on file with Justice, Akin Gump laid out a month-by-month strategy to pass the country’s trade deal. The plan included hosting social gatherings at the embassy; exploring hosting an event in Napa Valley to coincide with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) retreat; reaching out to national security experts at think tanks like the Center for American Progress and Third Way; and organizing the ambassador’s visits to California, Illinois, Michigan and Washington state.

Ben Freeman, Lydia Dennett, and Dahna Black at The Project on Government Oversight have written an in-depth report that addresses foreign campaign contributions , "Super Committee: Under the (Foreign) Influence?":

...For instance, lobbyists for South Korea have muscled in on Super Committee action. The top foreign lobbying firm in the U.S., Patton Boggs, LLP, was hired in February 2010 on behalf of both the non-profit Korean International Trade Association and the Embassy of South Korea to advocate for passage of the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement. They targeted committee co-chair Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) in a September 14, 2011 letter at least partly on the basis of her work on the Super Committee. The letter from Patton Boggs’ senior partner Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., to Murray states:

Ambassador Han would like to discuss the status of the pending US-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), including in the context of the ongoing deficit reduction discussions in which you play a crucial role…The Ambassador is anxious to discuss these matters, as well as to update you on KORUS's benefits for the United States, particularly the State of Washington...

Congressman James Clyburn (D-SC) and Patton Boggs, have a similar track record. The firm contacted Clyburn’s office about the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement more than any other representative in the past year and these contacts often coincided with campaign contributions the firm made to Clyburn. For example, on September 21, 2010 Patton Boggs lobbyists met with a Clyburn staffer to discuss the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. The following day, Patton Boggs PAC made a $5,000 contribution to the Senator, and the day after that Clyburn received an additional $500 from a Patton Boggs foreign lobbyist – a week later the firm got a face-to-face meeting with Clyburn to discuss the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement.

Clyburn may have had extra encouragement to take this meeting from Patton Boggs employees who don’t work as foreign lobbyists. In addition to the $5,500 Clyburn received from the firms’ PAC and a foreign lobbyist, employees of the firm made contributions to Clyburn of $500 on September 27th and $1,000 on the 30th, the same day that the Congressman met with their Patton Boggs colleagues. Prior to these contributions in September neither Patton Boggs PAC nor any of its employees had made a contribution to Clyburn in more than six months, according to CRP data.  Yet, in just nine days, from the time Patton Boggs first met with Clyburn’s associates until the day they met with the Representative himself, Clyburn received $7,000 in direct contributions from Patton Boggs and its employees.

Clyburn continued to promote the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Just this past April, the Korean Ambassador to the U.S., Han Duk-soo, and Clyburn attended a fundraiser in the Representative’s home district in South Carolina, where sponsors contributed up to $5,000. With echoes of lobbyist Tommy Boggs’ September 2011 letter to Senator Murray cited earlier, at the event the Korean Ambassador to the U.S. gave a keynote address on “the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement and the benefits for South Carolina's economy.”

Patton Boggs declined to comment.

A Loophole for Contributions from Foreign Nationals?

Was it just a coincidence that within days of meeting with Clyburn to discuss the Korea Free Trade Agreement Patton Boggs contributed $7,000 to his campaign? Were the contributions Baucus received from Akin, Gump completely independent of the United Arab Emirates? Perhaps, and it would be incredibly difficult to prove otherwise. While the relationships between Clyburn, Baucus and foreign lobbyists are not shining examples of democracy in America, these exchanges are considered legal based upon current campaign finance and foreign lobbying regulations. Lobbyists working on behalf of foreign governments, just like any other U.S. citizen, are free to make political contributions. Their foreign clients, however, are explicitly prohibited from making any political contributions in the United States.

These foreign lobbying relationships then lead to a legal paradox – foreign entities hire agents who can commit acts they otherwise legally could not. Each year, foreign lobbyists are paid hundreds of millions of dollars by their foreign clients and they make millions of dollars in contributions to politicians. Yet American citizens are asked to naively believe that foreign lobbyists never use foreign money to influence the U.S. political process.

For a compilation of articles on KORUS, please see this post: "Worse than NAFTA: S. Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) would hurt U.S. & S. Korean small farmers & workers; Burmese, N. Korean slave labor"

Organic farmer from Fukushima & Hokkaido activists share their experiences & demand the evacuation of children from Fukushima & nuclear-free Japan

Via Beyond Nuclear: Aileen Mioko Smith (executive director of Green Action); Sachiko Sato (organic farmer from Fukushima); Kaori Izumi (director of Shut the Tomari Reactor); Yukiko Anzai (organic farmer from Hokkaido); and Kevin Kamps (Beyond Nuclear)...

See also: "Bringing the Plight of Fukushima Children to the UN, Washington and the World" (Aileen Mioko Smith with Mark Selden, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Oct. 10, 2011)

Thyroid gland dysfunction found in Fukushima child evacuees

Kyodo via Mainichi on Oct. 4, 2011: Thyroid gland irregularities found in young evacuees from Fukushima:

A government map displaying radiation levels in the area around the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.

Hormonal and other irregularities were detected in the thyroid glands of 10 out of 130 children evacuated from Fukushima Prefecture, a Nagano Prefecture-based charity dedicated to aid for the victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident said Tuesday.

The Japan Chernobyl Foundation and Shinshu University Hospital did blood and urine tests on youngsters aged up to 16 including babies under the age of one for about a month through the end of August in Chino, Nagano, when the children stayed there temporarily after evacuating from Fukushima...

Three of the 10 children used to live within the 20-km no-go zone around the nuclear plant and one was from the so-called evacuation-prepared area in case of emergency in areas between 20 and 30 kilometers from the plant, while six others were from towns outside such zones...

Fukushima resident expresses faith in grassroots change at "Goodbye Genpatsu" demonstration on Sept. 19, 2011: "Please don't forget Fukushima."

The following is the English translation of a powerful speech delivered by citizen activist Ruiko Muto at the recent Goodbye Genpatsu demonstration held on September 19th. Muto herself is from Fukushima, and had ironically been working to help decommission the Dai-ichi nuclear plant at the time of the accident last March. These words provide a crucial perspective from someone who experienced the Fukushima catastrophe firsthand, which those us who are not there will never be able to fully comprehend.

Hello everyone. I came here today from Fukushima.

I came along with many busloads of my companions, both from Fukushima prefecture itself and from the places to which we have evacuated. For many, this is the first time to participate in a rally or demo. We reached out, invited each other along, and came here today because we want to tell you about the grief caused by the accident at the nuclear plant in Fukushima; and because we are determined that we, of all people, will raise our voices to say that we do not want nuclear reactors.

There are a few things I would like to say at the start.

I want to express my deep respect for each one of you, who have tackled so many things each day, in the midst of this difficult period since 3/11, in order to protect life.

I also want to express my gratitude to all of you who have warmly reached out to connect with the people of Fukushima prefecture and to support us in various ways. Thank you.

And to all the children and young people whom this accident has forced to shoulder a heavy burden, I want to apologise from my heart on behalf of the generation that brought about such a situation. I am truly sorry.

I want to tell you all that Fukushima is a very beautiful place. To the east, the Hamadori region gazes out across the deep blue Pacific Ocean. The Nakadori region is a treasure-house of fruits: peaches, pears and apples. Golden rice stalks droop their heads on the Aizu plain, around Lake Inawashiro and Mount Bandai, while the far side is framed by deep mountain ranges. This land, with its blue mountains and clear water, is our homeland.

The nuclear accident of 3/11 was a turning-point. Radiation, invisible to the eye, descended on this landscape, and we too became “hibakusha” *.

In the midst of widespread confusion, various things happened to us.

Caught between a rapidly rolled-out "safety campaign" and feelings of alarm, the connections between people were torn apart. Who can say how many people worried and grieved: in our localities, our workplaces, our schools, our homes? Day after day, many inescapable decisions were forced upon us. To flee, or not to flee? To eat, or not to eat? To hang the laundry outside, or not to hang it outside? To make our children wear masks, or not to make them? To plough our fields, or not to plough them? To speak out about something, or to remain silent? There were various agonising decisions.

And now, here we are.

During the past half year, the following things have become clear:

The truth of the situation is being hidden

The country is not protecting its citizens

The accident is still not over

The inhabitants of Fukushima prefecture are being made the subjects of a nuclear experiment

A huge volume of radioactive waste remains

Despite the enormous price that we have already paid, there are powers that are intent on driving nuclear power production forward.

We have been discarded.

We heave deep sighs of exhaustion and overwhelming sadness. But the words that spill from our mouths are "Don't you dare treat us like fools!", "Don't snatch away our lives!"

In the midst of our anger and grief, we, the citizens of Fukushima prefecture, are quietly rising up:

Mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, wanting to protect their children...

The young generation, fighting to stop their future from being stolen...

Workers trying to help those cleaning up the stricken nuclear plant, exposed to huge doses of radiation in the process...

Farmers filled with despair at the contamination of their land...

People with disabilities, determined that the radiation should not give rise to a new discrimination and separation...

One by one, each of us citizens is asking questions about the responsibility of the state, and of TEPCO **. And we are raising our voices to say "No more nuclear reactors!"

We have become the ogres of Tohoku***, quietly burning with fury.

We, the people of Fukushima, want to share our suffering, responsibility and hope, and to support each other as we move forward with our lives, whether we have left our hometowns or have stayed in our land. Please join with us. Please take note of the action that we are undertaking. We are learning about negotiations with the government, evacuation rulings, temporary evacuation, recovering our health, decontamination, measurement of radiation levels, nuclear reactors and radioactivity. And we are going everywhere to tell people about Fukushima. Today, companions of ours are giving a speech in New York. We are working on this in every way we can think of. Please help us. Please don't forget Fukushima.

There is one more thing that I want to talk about, which is how we each live our lives. We need to imagine the world on the far side of that socket into which we plug things so heedlessly. We need to put our minds on the fact that convenience and development come at the price of discrimination and sacrificing people. Nuclear power plants are on the far side of that socket. The human race is no more than one species among the living creatures on this earth. Is there any other species that usurps its own future? I want to live as a living being should, in harmony with this beautiful planet. Although it may be a small thing, I want to treat energy as a precious resource, and weave an ingenious, rich, creative life.

How can we build a new world that is the polar opposite of one reliant on nuclear reactors? Nobody knows the full answer to that. What I think we can do is for each one of us, in complete and total earnest, to think with our own minds, make sure to open our eyes wide, decide what we can do, and act on it, rather than following what someone else has decided. Let us remember that each one of us has that power.

Every one of us has the courage to change. Let us reclaim the confidence that was taken from us. And then, let us connect with each other. If the power that even now aims to advance nuclear plants is a vertical wall looming over us, our power extends horizontally, without limits, through our ongoing connection.

Try reaching out and gently holding the hand of the person next to you. Let's look at each other, and listen to each other's pain. Let's allow each other's anger and tears. Let's spread the warmth of these hands we're holding now throughout Japan and the world.

However overwhelmingly heavy the burden each one of us has to bear, however rough the road that we have to travel, let us support each other so that we do not lose sight of our goal, and let us live through this time freely and blithely.

Muto Ruiko
Fukushima, Japan

Translated by Emma Parker

Translator's notes:

* The "hibakusha" are the victims of the atomic bombings of 1945. The use of this term for the victims of the nuclear accident last March makes this one of the most emotionally and politically charged sentences of the speech. The moral position of the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is unassailable; no Japanese politician would dare be seen to belittle their suffering. Placing the victims of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi accident in the same category, however, emphasises that the lack of action by the government and TEPCO is just as inexcusable.

Also, the Japanese government was only able to obtain public acceptance of its nuclear power programme by acting as though nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation were two completely unrelated questions. Although many of the hibakusha have long been anti-nuclear weapons activists, few have been involved in the opposition to nuclear power. The accident of3/11 changed this situation, with many more people questioning whether any use of nuclear energy can really be safe, and the two movements are finally beginning to join forces.

** Tokyo Electric Power Corporation, the company that owns the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant

*** Additional explanation from Ruiko: the people of Tohoku were first called "ogres" by Sakanoueno Tamuramaro, an eighth-century general, because of their resistance to his attempts to bring them under the rule of the Kyoto-based court. In Tohoku, ogres are not seen primarily as scary creatures, but as figures of resistance with whom people sympathise. For example, there are many dances that depict them in this way. During centuries of exploitation and marginalization, the people of Tohoku have not been able to express their anger openly; but now they are becoming "ogres" once more.

Ruiko Muto is a key member of Hairo Action Fukushima (http://hairoaction.com/), an organization set up by a group of Fukushima citizens in October 2010, to plan and implement a "decommission the reactors action year" beginning on March 26 2011, the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

Michio Kaku on Fukushima's status & containment; parallels with BP Oil & Katrina; citizen-based radiation monitoring; clean energy; & Einstein

Some excerpts from Cindy Sheehan's interview with theoretical physicist Michio Kaku:

...Well I just got back from my 2-week trip to Japan and it was a grueling and exhausting trip. I ended up getting a high fever and having to stay in bed for a few days. Besides all that it was a very good trip and I learned so much about what is happening there with the Fukushima reactor meltdown and the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.

But also about the very committed and dedicated organizing that’s happening there to organize and revitalize a new movement against nuclear power and of course nuclear bombs. It was very inspirational for me to be in Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the days that my country dropped two weapons of mass destruction on innocent populations there and to see how the survival instinct in human beings is so great and the way people worked together and rebuilt those cities and their lives after the disaster.

I think it should give the people of Fukushima a lot of inspiration and hope too that recovery from this disaster is possible...

Now remember that three of the cores have experienced 100 percent core melts and the only reason why we didn’t have a catastrophe beyond human imagination is because one of the reactor operators flooded the reactors with sea water going against the orders of his superior. So he actually went against the orders of a superior, flooded the reactor with seawater, destroyed the reactor as a consequence but managed save the reactors from breech of containment which would have been catastrophic.

CS:..I saw you on CNN saying that the people of the world have been lied to about what has been happening in Fukushima. What are your personal thoughts about that?

DMK: You know the Japanese people have been very trusting of their government up to a point. But they were lied to so many times, for so many people it’s the last straw. They’re buying Geiger counters...they’re buying radiation meters on their own. So they simply don’t trust the government anymore...

Radiation levels as you know are being picked up all over the city. Tokyo is 150 miles from the Fukushima site so radiation levels are low let’s be clear about that. However, radiation levels have been detected 200 miles away from the reactor site way past Tokyo...

I think it’s a national scandal the fact that the government is not supplying radiation counters for children in the area. The local governments are taking the initiative. On local government in the Fukushima area has bought toximeters for children as young as kindergarten age. Can you imagine a kindergarten child going to school with a radiation badge and having to be briefed by parents on what this radiation badge does?

So again, people are taking their own initiative. They don’t trust the government anymore. By the way, as the reactor accident took place back in March we physicists in the United States have our own computer codes and we were running simulations of the accident in the United States and we clearly realized that the government was either lying or deliberately withholding information or were simply incompetent concerning their press releases.

We knew there was significant core damage even when the government was saying there was almost no damage whatsoever. We knew how significant it was because of the radiation that came out of the reactor and with our own computers we could then show that the Japanese government and TEPCO were either deceiving the people or were simply incompetent. This information is now available and again it adds to the distrust of the people towards the government and towards TEPCO. The fact that they were lied to and the fact that people put their trust in the government and the utility only now, months later to find out they were exposed to large quantities radiation when it was totally unnecessary.

The latest scandal just a few days ago was the fact that as the accident was progressing the government was withholding data and not dispersing radiation counters especially in areas where the radiation was quite high. So the people were needlessly exposed to high levels of radiation in the opening hours of the accident.

CS: Do you compare or draw parallels between what happening in Fukushima to what happened between BP and the Gulf of Mexico disaster where the people of the United States and the people of the area were also purposely, or because of stupidity, not given the correct information?

DMK: Yes, and you can also make a parallel with Katrina and what happened there. Engineers who build these reactors who build these dykes and levees simply don’t believe that the hundred-year storm will take place in their lifetime. So at Katrina in New Orleans for example the engineers realized that their levees could not withstand a hundred year storm. But their attitude was, well it is a hundred year storm it’s not going to happen in their lifetime, it’s not going to happen in their grand kids lifetime so why worry about it. Then of course the hundred-year storm hit.

Same thing with the Fukushima reactor accident. Engineers clearly realized that giant tsunamis could overwhelm their facilities. But again, it’s not going to happen in their lifetime or their grand kids lifetime so why should they worry? So then of course there we have it. And of course of you prepare for the hundred year storm it’s very expensive and nuclear power would be economically unviable if people had to prepare for the hundred year earthquake, the hundred year storm, the hundred year disaster it would make nuclear power uneconomical if they had to meet those standards

Realize that we have five reactors in various stages of degradation in the area. The accident is not over my any means. The accident could start up all over again if there is a secondary earthquake or another pipe break. In a worse case scenario if there is a major pipe break or a second earthquake you would have to evacuate the workers. Because the pumps are not working at the site it means you have to manually insert the water over the reactors and without the workers it would be in free fall. At that point with an evacuation of all the workers water levels would begin to drop, the reactors would begin to melt again and we would have breech of containment. That is release of uncontrolled amounts of radiation into the environment and that is a catastrophe beyond comprehension.

Realize that at Chernobyl, 25 years ago, we only had one reactor and only 25 percent of the core vaporized and was sent into the air. Here we have three reactors with 100 percent core melt, various stages of melting through the containment structure and if it were to start again it could be much worse than Chernobyl, many times worse than Chernobyl.

Realize that even at Chernobyl it took 600 thousand workers. Let me repeat that number again, 600 thousand workers over a half a million workers to finally bring that reactor in to a semi state of stability. The accident at Chernobyl is not over by the way. The reactor continues to melt, the core continues to melt into the ground at Chernobyl but it took over a half million workers. Many workers only going in a few minutes at a time because of the high levels of radiation. Everyone got a badge and a metal from Gorbachev. But this is certainly no way to build a nuclear power plant.

In Japan we have 3 reactors in very bad shape and it’s not stable because the pumps are not working yet and it means that the accident could start up all over again.

CS: What is the solution Dr. Kaku?

DMK: Yeah, let me say that right now Unit 1 is being encased in plastic like saran wrap in order to at least contain some the radiation that continues to be emitted from Unit 1 because of a partial breech of containment. Now Hewlitt corporation has estimated that 10 years will be required for the clean up. Nobody believes that number because it took 25 years at Chernobyl and that accident is still not over. It took 14 years for Three Mile Island to be brought under control. The Hitachi corporation made an estimate of 30 years to finally clean up the 3 reactor accidents.

But privately in the United States many engineers are saying 50 to 100 years. 50 to 100 years to finally clean up these accidents. First they have to put a TV camera into the core to photograph the extent of the melting. Then you insert hacksaws to cut up the core into pieces. Then you have to extract each piece from the reactor. All of this done under water because it’s too radioactive to be exposed to the air. As you can imagine this will take decades to bring under control...

DMK:...maybe the United States can take a cue from what’s happening in Europe. The Germans have pretty much thrown in the towel after initially backing nuclear power. The government has decided now to phase out all nuclear power plants in Germany. Switzerland has decided to follow suit and follow the example of the Germans. Italy right now is teetering on the brink of following Germany’s example. And right now in the United States Barack Obama is going to have to decide what to do with the revival of nuclear power within the United States.

CS: Like in Japan, we need to revive our anti-nuclear power movement, which had a lot of success here in the United States, and I think this is a time when we can do it.

DMK: Also remember that Barack Obama has shut down the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository. This means at the present time there is no federal waste dump to put high-level nuclear waste from over 100 commercial reactors and also military reactors. So we are suffering from a case of nuclear constipation form nuclear waste that is backing up at every single nuclear site in the United States. And we’re storing it, storing it on site, which I think is a very dangerous procedure. This means that nuclear power cannot move forward until we have some resolution to the nuclear waste issue.

CS: What if your opinion about the Sun obviously has an unlimited potential to be harnessed then use that energy for our increasing power needs. What do you think is the viability of that technology?

DMK: As you mentioned, the Sun is going to shine for another five billion years till it finally uses up it’s hydrogen fuel and of course the Earth only uses a fraction of the sunlight that hits it from the Sun. Right now solar costs are still more expensive than fuel fossil costs. But fossil fuels are limited in quantity and quite erratic in price. Prices are rising while the cost of solar keeps dropping every year. At some point the two curves will cross and at the point renewable solar, hydrogen and wind technology will become just as competitive in the market place as nuclear.

Remember now to build a nuclear power plant takes at least 10 years. So this means you have to look at the economics not today, but the economics 10 years from now. And the economics 10 years from now for solar, hydro, geothermal, wind power is quite attractive. For example, people are buying up solar rights to the Sahara Desert now in order to build plants sometime on the future when prices go down for Europe. So some European investors are saying the even though today it’s not economical to solarize the Sahara Desert in the future it will be. And in the future they want to make sure they have the rights to capture sunlight in the Sahara Desert.

So I think that is what we are going to see. We are going to see markets forces kick in because people will realize 10 years from now solar power is extremely competitive with fossil fuel in all aspects and somebody’s going to make a lot of money because at that point renewable technology will be every bit as competitive as fossil fuels.

CS:... One of my heroes is Dr. Albert Einstein and I know you continue his work trying to find a unified theory. But Dr. Einstein also became increasingly a pacifist and he had a lot of pacifist rhetoric towards the end of his life and I’d like you to comment on that.

DMK: Well, I wrote a biography about Albert Einstein and, first of all, you have to realize when he was a teenager he was a draft resistor. Refused to be drafted into the Germany Army. So he was a man, even as a teenager, who put some of his political philosophy into play during World War 1. He was one of very few intellectuals to sign a manifesto against German entry into WWI. There were 100 German intellectuals who signed a manifesto for German entry--there were only three intellectuals including Einstein who signed the manifesto against WWI. During WWII he began to modify his position a bit and say that the German Army should be opposed, you simply can do nothing and allow this racist totalitarian entity to start to take over the world.

Then right after the bombing of Hiroshima he founded the first anti-nuclear organization. It was called the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and it was the very first anti-nuclear organization formed right after the bombing of Hiroshima by Albert Einstein...

My favorite Einstein quotes is that “if a theory can not be explained to a child then the theory is probably useless." So all great theories, the theories of Newton, Einstein, all these great theories in principle can be explained to a child.

Hopefully in my I work I try to explain the excitement that we feel converging on this great theories that will one day answer these enormously important questions that even bedeviled Einstein. Is time travel possible? Are there other dimensions? Are there gateways to other universes? These are questions that Einstein actually wrote about and these are actually questions in principle that we can solve using string theory. So I think that we are in a great position now.

Terry Tempest Williams on living with radiation from the 1,000+ nuclear bomb explosions in North America

(Image: Richard Miller, “Areas crossed by two or more radioactive clouds during the era of nuclear testing in the American Southwest, 1951-62” in Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing (Two-Sixty Press, 1999))

When Terry Tempest Williams began her soul-searching chronicle that explores how her family, friends, and community members lived with the environmental, psychological and health consequences of the thousand nuclear test explosions in the American Southwest (most Southerners don't even know this, but Mississippi was also nuked twice), she felt unheard and unseen. Then she visited Hiroshima, and upon meeting other survivors of nuclear radiation, no longer felt alone.

Her 20-year-old memoir, Refuge, is more relevant than ever, after Fukushima. An excerpt from her last chapter, "The Clan of One-Breasted Women":

Over dessert, I shared a recurring dream of mine, I told my father that for years, as long as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert—that this image had so permeated my being that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas.

"You did see it," he said.

"See what?"

"The bomb. The cloud...

I stared at my father.

"I thought you knew that," he said. "It was a common occurence in the fifties."

It was at this moment that I realized the deceit I had been living under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother—members, years later, of the Clan of One-Breasted Women.

It is a well-known story in the Desert West. "The Day We Bombed Utah," or more accurately, the years we bombed Utah: above ground atomic testing in Nevada took place from January 27, 1951 to July 11, 1962. Not only were the winds blowing north covering "low-use segments of the population" with fallout and leaving sheep dead in their tracks, but the climate was right...

Much has been written about this "American nuclear tragedy." Public health was secondary to national security...

Again and again, the American public was told by its government, in spite of burns, blisters, and nausea, "It ihas been found that the tests may be conducted with adequate assurance of safety under conditions prevailing at the bombing reservations." Assuaging public fears was simply a matter of public relations. "Your best action," an Atomic Energy Commission booklet read, "is not to be worried about fallout."

...The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons is the same fear I saw in my mother's body...

My father's memory was correct. The September blast we drove through in 1957 was part of Operation Plumbbob, one of the most intensive series of bomb tests to be initiated. The flash of light in the night in the desert, which I had always thought was a dream, developed into a family nightmare. It took fourteen years, from 1957 to 1971, for cancer to manifest in my mother—the same time, Howard L. Andrews, an authority in radioactive fallout at the National Institutes of Health, says radiation cancer requires to become evident...

One night I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing fire in the desert. They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its phases. They mocked presumption of even-tempered beings...

- Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, 1991

"Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare" sheds light on low-level radioactive contamination in Washington State, Russia, Europe (& holds insights for Japan)

*"Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare" airs Oct. 16, 2011 on Sundance Channel*

Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare spotlights contaminated regions in Washington State (which has the highest incidence of cancer in the U.S.) and Russia, and overviews the problem of nuclear waste that also hangs over Japan, the UK, Germany, and France.

...Some notes from the film...

Filmmaker Eric Guéret and producer Laure Noualhat open their 2009 film overviewing how nuclear nations have strewn nuclear waste into oceans for decades. Some ocean bottoms have become nuclear dumping grounds, covered with radioactive waste after the barrels ripped open.

Mike Townsley of Greenpeace International describes the rusted radioactive waste barrels and answers his own question: "Where’s the radioactive waste? It’s in the environment. It becomes part of the food chain.

"Everybody did this. The British. The French. The Americans. The Russians. In less than 50 years, they've buried over 100 metric tons of nuclear waste in various oceans."

"It took ten years for nuclear activists to build worldwide support for a 1993 UN Treaty forbid dumping radioactive waste."


Hanford Nuclear Complex, along the Columbia River in Washington State, 1960
Hanford Nuclear Reservation (HNR), the world's first nuclear manufacturing site, is one of the most contaminated places in the world. In 1942, the Roosevelt administration chose Washington State as a site to develop radioative components for atomic bombs because they wanted a remote area to minimize fatalities in case of an accident.

At its peak, the massive complex (half the size of the state of Maryland) employed 51,000 people at 9 nuclear reactors and plutonium factories. A breeder reactor was built in 1943 to produce plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb. No one was allowed to know how many leaks, accidents or fires took place at Hanford.

"This was all secret. It was a US Army operation."

Without the consent of nearby residents (farmers and members of the Yakima tribe, the indigenous people whose territory included Washington state), plant operators used water from a nearby river for plant cooling and discharged the used water right back into the river. Plant operators let people use the river without telling families of the dangers to which they were exposed.

(Exposure map for the "Green Run" U.S. Air Force nuclear radiation experiment at Hanford Nuclear Reservation that released somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 curies of iodine-131 into the air on December 2-3, 1949. (Image: Toxipedia.org)

The plant produced 1,500 billion liters of nuclear waste that operators dumped, contaminating the Columbia River ecosystem. They poured liquid waste directly into trenches dug in the earth and put 210 million liters of radioactive and chemical waste into 177 concrete tanks they buried in the ground. By the 1960's, some tanks were already leaking, and now 67 tanks have failed, leaking 4 million liters of waste, thereby contaminating the water table. In 2002, Strontium 90 was found present in Columbia River fish.

The film explains that, besides Hanford, the US government built a dozen nuclear sites in the U.S. to support the Manhattan Project, then shifts to a contaminated region in Russia that even most people in Russia did not know about until decades after the disasters, and that most people worldwide still don't know about...

In 1976, news leaked about an nuclear waste explosion in 1957 at the Mayak nuclear weapons complex (built by Gulag-era prison laborers in the eastern Urals and probably modeled after Hanford; U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers' destination when he was shot down in Soviet airspace in 1960). The explosion at Mayak, a Soviet plutonium production site, was the worst nuclear accident in the world before Chernobyl, and one of three catastrophic nuclear accidents at Mayak.

Villages in a previously idyllic region were contaminated by the fallout. The disaster was kept secret; no one could see the radiation, so didn't understand what had happened. The Soviet government buried the harvest, saying it was contaminated but they wouldn't explain how this happened; and dumped nuclear waste into lakes, which contaminated the Techa River which goes to Siberia.

Many villages were evacuated. Two thirds of the population have left. Now village houses are empty because almost everyone who stayed have died. Cancers. Heart conditions. Diabetes. All linked to radioactive contamination of the environment: tritrium and cesium-137 has transformed affected soil into radioactive waste. Plutonium 239 and 240, which creates the explosive component of nuclear bombs, is now part of the river.

One lonely peasant who refused to leave says, “When I see the empty houses, I feel the same anguish as after a bombing.”

Others who chose or had no alternative but to remain say they are waiting to die of cancer and are tested every year: “They are using us as guinea pigs.” Last year I lost my son. He would have been 48. He died of cancer. We live like guinea pigs. It’s our fate.”

The Soviet Union tried to keep the Mayak explosion at its top secret plant and the consequences of radioactive fallout secret. It wasn't until dissident scientist Zhores Mendedev reported the accident in 1976 that it became known to the outside world. The Gorbachev government confirmed this a decade later. With Glasnost, people began to talk...

A Russian interviewee in the film explains: “It’s dangerous to our entire society. The nuclear industry started to let its secrets go. There were rumor that wrong-doings were hidden; we started talking about Mayak. Then Yeltsin came to power. Things hushed up again."

All nuclear energy plants and weapons plants discharge nuclear waste, so the issue of low-level radiation contamination is problematic for the UK, France, Germany, Japan and other countries that have nuclear energy industries and also for nations that produce nuclear weapons.

The AREVA nuclear waste reprocessing plant in La Hague has long been dumping nuclear waste into the English Channel. Iodine 129 is being detected as far as the Arctic. Seaweed, shellfish and mollusks are contaminated because the adjacent seabed has been turned into a nuclear waste dump. Krypton-85 is released into the atmosphere and carried by winds all over Europe.

The largest utilities company in Europe, France's EDF, sends "radioactive material" (recycled uranium) by train in metal containers for storage at an open-air car park in Seversk, Siberia [formerly a secret "closed city" where there are several nuclear reactors, plants for reprocessing uranium and plutonium as well as storage and production facilities for nuclear weapons].

In Japan, the US and the UK, the usual way to deal with nuclear waste is to keep it in large storage pools (a hazardous non-solution, as we now know from Fukushima). If the pools lose their water, the waste fuel heats up and catches fire.

Both Germany and Switzerland pronounced storage pools unsafe. Germany has moved nuclear waste into concrete into hillsides or thick concrete buildings.

Now the world has 450 nuclear waste storage pools spread across countries using nuclear power. Some have proposed storing nuclear waste at very deep depths in the earth, but is this efficient give the totality of costs of the nuclear industry, which would cease to exist without extensive taxpayer-funded subsidies?

It's misleading to use Hiroshima and Nagasaki high-level radiation models as a comparison with continuous external and internal low-level radiation exposure.

The French government's attitude towards nuclear energy might be likened to a state religion. The state almost wholly owns AREVA, the French nuclear corporation and biggest atomic operator in the world; therefore the French government pushes nuclear energy worldwide for its own profit and has failed to develop renewable sources of energy. Germany markedly contrasts with France: the broad public is not inhibited by the state from engaging in serious debate about the risks of nuclear energy production.

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More on the film from the Int. Panel of Fissile Materials blog:

On 20 February 2010 Greenpeace issued a call for a moratorium on shipments of reprocessed uranium from France to Russia. Activists had been repeatedly blocking rail shipments of the material from the La Hague reprocessing plant to Cherbourg port.

Parliamentary enquiry, government statements, Greenpeace actions are a few of the stunning consequences of a 100-minutes TV documentary Déchets - Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire (Waste - The Nuclear Nightmare) broadcast by the Franco-German station ARTE for the first time on 13 October 2009 and re-broadcast by various television stations since. The documentary presents the results of an investigation into nuclear waste management in the US, Russia, Germany and France. The authors Eric Guéret and Laure Noualhat were often accompanied by technicians of the French independent radiation-monitoring lab CRIIRAD.

They detected and measured radiation in many places where they went, from the Columbia river close to the US nuclear weapons lab in Hanford to the Soviet counterpart Mayak in the Urals. Some of the most remarkable scenes include a Geiger counter that goes crazy under a publicly accessible bridge over the Techa river and a scene outside the French "plutonium factory" called reprocessing plant at La Hague. In the latter case a spokesman for operator AREVA, when asked about radiation levels in the fields outside the plant, stated after a long hesitation that he would not call this contamination, but "absence of impact" before stumbling: "Well, we'll redo that one..."

However, remarkably enough, the largest impact had a simple mass calculation that the journalists presented. Constantly facing the AREVA PR that states that 96% of the nuclear materials are "recycled" through the reprocessing scheme, the reporters inquired where the recovered uranium, roughly 95% of the mass of spent fuel, does end up. In fact, AREVA has been sending most of the reprocessed uranium (23,000 tons were still stored in France at the end of 2008), to Russia officially for re-enrichment.

In fact, even if all of that uranium had indeed been re-enriched, which is not the case, over 90% of the mass remains in Russia as enrichment tails. This material is waste, because there is absolutely no economic incentive to re-enrich it, in particular considering the hundreds of thousands of tons of "clean", first generation enrichment tails that are stored in Russia and in the other major enrichment countries, including in France (close to 260,000 tons at two sites).

The message that AREVA's "recycling" ratio had to be corrected from 95% to less than 10% of the original mass send a shockwave through the French political landscape. The minister of Environment asked for clarifications and the parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technological Option Assessment (OPECST) organized public hearings. During the hearings EDF has admitted that, apart from a period of about five years, 100% of the reprocessed uranium had been sent to Russia.

Between 2000 and approximately 2005 (the EDF representative was not certain) reprocessed uranium was sent to URENCO's Dutch plant that can re-enrich reprocessed uranium (contrary to URENCO's UK and German plants). EDF signed a contract with AREVA to use part of the Georges-Besse-2 plant, currently under construction, to enrich reprocessed uranium for a period of about 10 years starting in 2013. The French Nuclear Safety Authority ASN announced that by the end 2010 it will have finished studies into the potential requalification of reprocessed uranium as waste.

The full version of the film "Déchets - Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire", by Eric Guéret and Laure Noualhat (in French and German with English subtitles) is available online. ARTE-Editions has also published a 210-page book by Laure Noualhat with the same title (in French).

More on nuclear waste:

• "Top Ten Talking Points on the Environmental Impacts Caused by Reprocessing High-Level Radioactive Waste" (Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear, November 2008)

• Heart of America Northwest: The Public's Voice for Hanford's Cleanup

• "Hanford Nuclear Waste Still Poses Serious Risks"(Marc Pitzke, Spiegel Online, March 24, 2011) In-depth report on radioactive contamination, including the intentional release of radioactive clouds during an experiment by Hanford physicists that they called "Green Run."

• "Risky Nuclear Experiments on a Global Collision Course -- it's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Radioactive World!" (Dvija Michael Bertish, HOANW blog, Feb. 2011):

the states of New York, Connecticut and Vermont have sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over a federal policy that allows nuclear waste to be stored at a nuclear power plant for 60 years after it has been decommissioned. The three states challenge this policy because it allows long term storage of nuclear waste without environmental review. Most nuclear plants were developed without sufficient infrastructure for safe long term waste storage.

• "Analysis Triples U.S. Plutonium Waste Figures" (Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times, July 10, 2010)

• "Mayak: A 50-year tragedy" (Greenpeace, September 28, 2007)

• "The French Nuclear Industry Is Bad Enough in France; Let's Not Expand It to the U.S. -- Areva, France's nuclear industry, has a solid reputation, but a trail of radioactive waste and deaths in Africa follow its wake."(Linda Gunter, Alternet, March 23, 2009 - mentions the French use of leftover radioactive dirt (tailings) and rocks from 210 abandoned uranium mines in school playgrounds and ski resort parking lots.)

• Cheylabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet (This site contains information about Kyshtym-57, an environmental organization which is working to help radiation victims in the Chelyabinsk region; a film description and script from Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet, a documentary by Slawomir Grunberg.)

• Cheylabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet official film website:

"Nobody knows anything about us. Chernobyl happened, but that's Europe. The pollution reached Europe, and the whole world was upset. But us, out here in the backwoods of Russia? Nobody knows about it, nobody in the world cares about the fate we've sealed for ourselves here." - Farida Shaimardanova, Muslyumovo teacher

• "Urals Nuclear Disasters Contaminated 450,000 : Russia: Figure is given by officials in account of events at the Mayak atomic plant from 1948 to 1967. They say site could still pose hazards" (Richard Bourdreaux, The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 30, 1993)

Peace in Asia and the Pacific: Alternatives to Asia-Pacific Militarization Conference - Oct. 21-22, 2011, American Univ., Washington D.C.

Peace in Asia and the Pacific: Alternatives to Asia-Pacific Militarization

October 21, 2011 - 7:00pm - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - 6:00pm

Initiated by the American Friends Service Committee

To register and for additional information: http://afsc.org/PeaceInAsiaPacific

Please join us and consider having your organization co-sponsor this uniquely important conference.

Even as the Pentagon has been pursuing its Long War across the Middle East and Central Asia, the campaign to contain China has been driving U.S. strategic war planning and military spending.

Our movements to prevent war and to address the impacts of the militarization of the federal budget are not prepared to the long term designs of the Pentagon, right-wing and the Military-Industrial-Complex to reinforce and deepen U.S. militarism across the Asia-Pacific.

As former U.S. Ambassador to China R. Stapleton Roy put it, “we poked China in the eye” by sending the nuclear powered and nuclear capable aircraft carrier the U.S.S. George Washington into the East China Sea “because we could.”

The U.S. still has more than 100 military bases and installations across Japan. In Korea, activists have engaged in hunger strikes and been jailed for opposing the decimation of their communities with new U.S. military bases. The U.S. now has tacit military alliances with Vietnam and India and is exploring the return of military bases to the Philippines. The National Military Strategy issued in 2010 also calls for expanded military cooperation with Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Singapore.

While the US economy stagnates under the tremendous burden of its military expenditures, China has poured resources into becoming the world’s workshop and building 21st century infrastructures and technologies. As the world’s financial centers tilt towards Beijing, new military spending in the region has increased the complexities of its territorial disputes with Japan and ASEAN nations with competing claims to South China Sea islands. A growing number of militarized “incidents” and violent conflict have also occurred on the Korean Peninsula.

The conference goals are:

Build our movements’ capacities to understand and respond to these developments
Identify and promote campaigns that challenge Asia-Pacific militarism and that advocate meaningful alternatives.
Facilitate solidarity between U.S. and Asia-Pacific peace movements, advocates and campaigns
In addition to our keynote speakers, panels will be devoted to Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and peace movement campaigns

Workshops to include:

Asia-Pacific Peace Movements

Southeast Asia

Central/South Asia

Economic Realities & Dynamics of the Asia-Pacific

Global Costs of Militarism

History 101: U.S. in Asia-Pacific

Human Rights

Korea

Nuclear Weapons Abolition

U.S.-China relations

Other workshops to be developed


Keynotes by Madame Yan Junqi, Vice President of the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament and the Vice Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress and by Professor Bruce Cumings, Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History Chairperson of the Department, University of Chicago* Panels on Northeast and Southeast Security Issues, Peace Movement Campaigns and Workshops (see below).

*Madame Yan is confirmed. Professor Cumings has been invited. This conference will also serve as the 4th Peace Forum organized by The American Friends Service Committee and the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament.

Additional information, including registration, available at http://afsc.org/PeaceInAsiaPacific.

Location

Kay Spiritual Life Center, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave NW
Washington, DC 20016
See map: Google Maps
Contact Information:
Joseph Gerson
(617)661-6130
jgerson@afsc.org

Wangari Mathaai: When we destroy our natural environment, we degrade ourselves; in helping the earth to heal, we heal ourselves

Wangaari Mathaai, the late Kenyan visionary, articulated the interconnections between democracy, demilitarization, human rights and environmentalism in her holistic vision of a life-sustaining civilization:

Spiritual Environmentalism: Healing Ourselves by Replenishing the Earth

During my more than three decades as an environmentalist and campaigner for democratic rights, people have often asked me whether spirituality, different religious traditions, and the Bible in particular had inspired me, and influenced my activism and the work of the Green Belt Movement (GBM). Did I conceive conservation of the environment and empowerment of ordinary people as a kind of religious vocation? Were there spiritual lessons to be learned and applied to their own environmental efforts, or in their lives as a whole?...

However, I never differentiated between activities that might be called "spiritual" and those that might be termed "secular." After a few years I came to recognize that our efforts weren't only about planting trees, but were also about sowing seeds of a different sort—the ones necessary to give communities the self-confidence and self-knowledge to rediscover their authentic voice and speak out on behalf of their rights (human, environmental, civic, and political). Our task also became to expand what we call "democratic space," in which ordinary citizens could make decisions on their own behalf to benefit themselves, their community, their country, and the environment that sustains them...

In the process of helping the earth to heal, we help ourselves.

Through my experiences and observations, I have come to believe that the physical destruction of the earth extends to us, too. If we live in an environment that's wounded—where the water is polluted, the air is filled with soot and fumes, the food is contaminated with heavy metals and plastic residues, or the soil is practically dust—it hurts us, chipping away at our health and creating injuries at a physical, psychological, and spiritual level. In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves.

The reverse is also true. In the process of helping the earth to heal, we help ourselves. If we see the earth bleeding from the loss of topsoil, biodiversity, or drought and desertification, and if we help reclaim or save what is lost—for instance, through regeneration of degraded forests—the planet will help us in our self-healing and indeed survival. When we can eat healthier, nonadulterated food; when we breathe clean air and drink clean water; when the soil can produce an abundance of vegetables or grains, our own sicknesses and unhealthy lifestyles become healed. The same values we employ in the service of the earth's replenishment work on us, too. We can love ourselves as we love the earth; feel grateful for who we are, even as we are grateful for the earth's bounty; better ourselves, even as we use that self-empowerment to improve the earth; offer service to ourselves, even as we practice volunteerism for the earth.

Human beings have a consciousness by which we can appreciate love, beauty, creativity, and innovation or mourn the lack thereof. To the extent that we can go beyond ourselves and ordinary biological instincts, we can experience what it means to be human and therefore different from other animals. We can appreciate the delicacy of dew or a flower in bloom, water as it runs over the pebbles or the majesty of an elephant, the fragility of the butterfly or a field of wheat or leaves blowing in the wind. Such aesthetic responses are valid in their own right, and as reactions to the natural world they can inspire in us a sense of wonder and beauty that in turn encourages a sense of the divine.

The environment becomes sacred, because to destroy what is essential to life is to destroy life itself.

That consciousness acknowledges that while a certain tree, forest, or mountain itself may not be holy, the life-sustaining services it provides—the oxygen we breathe, the water we drink—are what make existence possible, and so deserve our respect and veneration. From this point of view, the environment becomes sacred, because to destroy what is essential to life is to destroy life itself.

Read more of this entire excerpt of Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World here.

Wangari Mathaai: "Rather than go backwards, we ought to move forward, towards a vision of a world without war."

...rather than go backwards, we ought to move forward, towards a vision of a world without war. A world where every nation would have an Article 9 in its constitution.

- Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Green Belt Movement