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October 31st, 2013

LaRouche PAC issued the following statement, for mass circulation, on Oct. 30, 2013.

The entire trans-Atlantic financial system is hopelessly bankrupt, and the only solution to this crisis is the immediate reinstatement of Glass Steagall in the United States. Unless the Congress passes Glass Steagall in the coming days and weeks, with a veto-proof majority, breaking the power of Wall Street and restoring a commercial banking system free from the quadrillion dollars in derivatives and other gambling debts, the American people will soon be facing a mass kill, far beyond the genocidal horrors that have been imposed on Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus and Spain. Wall Street must be bankrupted before they bankrupt us all.

Every month, the Federal Reserve, with the full backing of President Obama, pumps $85 billion in fresh bailout money into Wall Street and the major European banks. At the same time, the White House and Congress have agreed to impose killer austerity cuts on the vast majority of Americans. In the coming months, the body count will skyrocket, as health insurance costs triple, as the health care delivery system is vastly scaled back, and vital social safety net programs, from Medicare and Medicaid to Social Security and Food Stamps, are stripped down to a minimum.

Already, under Obamacare,14 million Americans have lost their existing health insurance, thousands of doctors have been fired by the major HMOs, critical care hospitals are to be shut down all across the American heartland, and home health care services are being cancelled. Whether you can afford health insurance or not, the doctors, nurses, hospitals and research facilities are not going to be there unless you are among the wealthiest handful of Americans.

To be blunt: This is how it was in Nazi Germany under the Hitler T-4 euthanasia program, and this is how it is in Great Britain today with the Tony Blair-initiated N.I.C.E. program, under which medical care is denied to those deemed to be lives not worth living.

In order to feed Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for bailouts, hard-working Americans are being told that their pensions can no longer be paid and they are facing a brief life of abject poverty, despite decades of contributions to their pension plans. City workers in Detroit have been told that their pensions will be cut by 90 percent, which is nothing less than a death sentence. What is happening in Detroit today is in the near-future for every city in America. In New York City, the home of the Wall Street too-big-to-fail banks, the official poverty rate is 46 percent.

Under Title II of the Dodd-Frank bill, not even your household savings accounts are secure. As in Cyprus, your savings will be looted as part of the so-called bail-in scheme to save the banks at all costs.

The message coming from Washington is clear: If you are old, sick or disabled, you are as good as dead. If you are young, you have no future. The message is coming from President Obama and from Congressional Republicans, who are fully complicit in plans to vastly reduce Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So far, the vast majority of Democrats in Congress have been cowed into accepting Obama’s diktats.

The only serious fight-back is coming from those in Congress who are backing the return to Glass Steagall. With two bills in the Senate (S. 985 and S. 1282) and one in the House (HR. 129) with 75 co-sponsors, Glass Steagall could be restored now. It is no exaggeration to say that this is a life or death issue. Under Glass Steagall, the United States can return to a Constitutionally-mandated credit system and launch an era of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity for all. Without Glass Steagall, we are facing mass kill.

By Jeffrey Heller

24 October 2013

@ www.reuters.com

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia and Israel are united in their opposition to Iran, but they cannot cooperate as long the Palestinian conflict continues, Israel’s chief peace negotiator said on Thursday.

“When you hear the Saudis talking about what needs to be done in order to prevent a (nuclear-armed) Iran, I mean it sounds familiar,” said Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister who is leading talks with the Palestinians.

“I think that you can hear that Arabic sounds familiar to Hebrew when it comes to Iran,” she said, making a rare public linkage between the goals of Israel and Saudi Arabia, which have long been enemies and have no diplomatic ties.

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Muslim regional rival of Shi’ite Iran, fear that Tehran is developing atomic weapons and looking to change the balance of power in the Middle East. Iran says its nuclear activities are entirely peaceful.

Saudi Arabia has grown increasingly frustrated with perceived U.S. weakness in confronting Syria’s civil war and with Washington’s recent diplomatic engagement with Tehran – concerns Israel shares.

Three years ago, diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks said that Saudi King Abdullah had frequently urged the United States to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear programme. Israel has also hinted at military action, saying it was prepared to stand alone to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing parliament last week, hailed the rare commonality of Israeli-Arab interests as something that could help advance decades-old peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Livni, however, suggested that was unrealistic, telling a conference organised by the Jerusalem Post that Arab states first wanted to see progress in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking before contemplating any change of policy toward Israel.

“In order to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon, we need to cooperate with those (who) understand that Iran is a threat to them as well,” she said, speaking in English.

“But unfortunately, the open conflict with the Palestinians makes it impossible or very difficult for them to act with Israel.”

Last week, Saudi Arabia cited international failure to grant Palestinians a state as one of the reasons it had renounced a coveted seat on the United Nations Security Council.

“It is now very clear that the interests of the State of Israel (and) the moderates or the pragmatic in the region are the same,” Livni said. “So we need on one hand to continue putting pressure on Iran … and simultaneously to move forward in the peace process.”

Both issues were on the agenda of a lengthy meeting between Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday in Rome that exposed differences over the Iranian issue.

Israel has repeatedly called for the effective dismantling of Iran’s nuclear programme, while the United States has suggested better safeguards are needed to ensure it is peaceful.

CORE ISSUES

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, revived in July after a three-year hiatus, have shown few signs of progress.

“I cannot share with you today what we are doing exactly in the negotiations room, but the basic idea is the need to end the conflict,” Livni said.

“In order to do so, we need to address all the core issues,” she added, in a reference to the borders of a Palestinian state, security arrangements, the future of settlements and Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees.

Livni said both sides had decided “that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, effectively ruling out any interim accord that many Israeli leaders are believed to favour.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, a senior Palestinian official described the talks as very difficult.

“There is a long road ahead but we are following the instructions from President (Mahmoud) Abbas and are very keen to reach peace,” the official said.

(Editing by Crispian Balmer and Alistair Lyon)

By Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez

23 October 13

@ Democracy Now!

New research shows many so-called experts who appeared on television making the case for U.S. strikes on Syria had undisclosed ties to military contractors. A new report by the Public Accountability Initiative identifies 22 commentators with industry ties. While they appeared on television or were quoted as experts 111 times, their links to military firms were disclosed only 13 of those times. The report focuses largely on Stephen Hadley, who served as national security adviser to President George W. Bush. During the debate on Syria, he appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and Bloomberg TV. None of these stations informed viewers that Hadley currently serves as a director of the weapons manufacturer Raytheon that makes Tomahawk cruise missiles widely touted as the weapon of choice for bombing Syria. He also owns over 11,000 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate. We speak to Kevin Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative, a co-author of the report.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we move on now to a very interesting study that has just come out. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, new research shows many so-called experts who appeared on television making the case for U.S. strikes on Syria had undisclosed ties to military contractors. The report by the Public Accountability Initiative identifies 22 commentators with the industry. While they appeared on television or were quoted as experts 111 times, their links to military firms were disclosed only 13 of those times. Let’s take a look at how some of those pundits were identified during recent television appearances.

JAKE TAPPER: For insight into this high-stakes diplomatic mission, I’m joined by former secretary of state to the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: OK, let’s analyze all this now with our panel of experts. Former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Cartwright.

GREGG JARRETT: General Jack Keane joins us, Fox News military analyst, served as four-star general and Army vice chief of staff. General, good to see you, as always.

JAKE TAPPER: I want to bring in two former generals to talk about this. Anthony Zinni is the former commander-in-chief of CENTCOM, and Michael Hayden is the former CIA director. He’s now a principal with the Chertoff Group, a risk management firm.

FOLLY BAH THIBAULT: Well, joining me now, live from Washington, D.C., is former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen. Secretary Cohen, thank you for being on Al Jazeera.

 

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: Joining us is Ambassador John Negroponte. He served as the first U.S. director of national intelligence, as well as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations, and many more posts, I should add. Nice to see you, sir.

JOHN NEGROPONTE: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: A sampling of recent TV coverage on Syria. All the pundits interviewed currently have ties to military and intelligence contractors, investment firms with a significant defense or intelligence focus, or ties to consulting firms with a focus on defense or intelligence. General Jack Keane, for example, is on the board of General Dynamics. General Anthony Zinni is on the board of BAE Systems. General James Cartwright is on the board of Raytheon.

Joining us now from San Francisco, Kevin Connor, director and co-founder of the Public Accountability Initiative, co-author of the report called “Conflicts of Interest in the Syria Debate.”

Lay out what you found, Kevin.

KEVIN CONNOR: Sure. The report really maps out the extent to which the policy conversation on the airwaves around Syria was really dominated by individuals with ties to the defense industry. And these ties, as you laid out there, really were never disclosed – rarely disclosed, only 13 times out of 111 appearances that we identified during the Syria debate.

Now, the importance of that is that readers and viewers at home, who are, you know, seeing these people comment, are introduced to them as having gravitas and credibility – former secretaries of state, diplomats, generals with expertise. You would think these are independent experts who probably retired with a healthy pension, when in fact they’re representing interests that would profit from heightened military activity abroad in Syria. So that has a corrupting effect on the public discourse around an issue like Syria that’s so – so important. And it really goes back to the responsibility of media outlets to disclose these ties and also the individuals here who are implicated in the culture of corruption and the revolving door in Washington.

Anjali mentioned earlier, on the first segment, about the jobs program for the defense industry. And there’s a jobs program in place for the foreign policy establishment as they move out of their public positions onto the boards of these corporations. These aren’t – these are part-time positions, but they’re very high-paying positions. They have financial incentives and fiduciary responsibilities to companies that are profiting from war, profiting from current levels of defense spending. And this is something that viewers at home should be notified of. And it perhaps should preclude their involvement in debates like this, or perhaps they should not get the podium and platform they’re given for their views, given the fact that they have these conflicts of interest that are quite serious in some cases.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Kevin, your report focuses largely on Stephen Hadley, who served as a national security adviser to President George W. Bush. During the debate on Syria, he appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg TV. None of these stations informed viewers that Hadley currently serves as a director of the weapons manufacturer Raytheon that makes Tomahawk cruise missiles. He also owns over 11,000 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate. Here’s Stephen Hadley being interviewed by Greta Van Susteren on Fox News about the so-called red line on Syria.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: Did he, or didn’t he? And does it matter who did, as we sort of fuss about this red line? Joining us is Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to the Bush administration. Doesn’t – does it – did he set the line? And does it matter?

STEPHEN HADLEY: He did set the line, and it probably doesn’t matter, because the line is set, and the credibility of the country is on – is on the line. And in some sense, the Congress needs to act in such a way so as not to undermine the credibility of President Obama. You know, we only have one president at a time, and he embodies the United States. So if his credibility is undermined, the country’s credibility is undermined. And I think that’s an argument that people are beginning to think about on the – on Capitol Hill.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Stephen Hadley. And, of course, the Tomahawk missile that Raytheon produces was the one that was going to be used in the attack on Syria. Kevin, your response?

KEVIN CONNOR: Well, this is just a really egregious, significant conflict of interest that people should have been notified of. When Hadley was making the rounds to the outlets you mentioned, he also published an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing strenuously for war, and at the time, as you mentioned, serves on the board of Raytheon, has nearly $900,000 worth of stock in that company, makes $130,000 a year in cash compensation, actually chairs the public affairs committee for Raytheon, which means that he has oversight of sort of the company’s public profile and image in the media and in policy circles. So this is really a quite clear conflict of interest, and it should have been disclosed to readers and viewers. The fact that –

AMY GOODMAN: The Washington Post has also been criticized for failing to inform its readers about Stephen Hadley’s defense ties. On September 8th, as you said, Kevin, the paper published an op-ed by Hadley that was headlined “To Stop Iran, Obama Must Enforce Red Lines with Assad.” The article described Hadley simply as a former national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration. Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor at the Post, defended the paper’s move. Hiatt said, quote, “More disclosure is generally better than less, but I’m confident that Hadley’s opinion piece, which was consistent with the worldview he has espoused for many years, was not influenced by any hypothetical, certainly marginal, impact to Raytheon’s bottom line.” That was Hiatt’s statement. Kevin Connor, your response?

KEVIN CONNOR: Well, first, you know, I would like to say kudos to The Washington Post for actually covering the report and really requiring Hiatt to respond. But his response is really absurd. It demonstrates a really fuzzy understanding of conflicts of interest and ethical issues. This is a clear conflict of interest. The conflicts of interest actually raise the possibility of corruption, the corruption of one’s motives. There are relationships that might call into question one’s motives, and this clearly does. And nothing Hiatt said really, you know, defends against that. Hiatt might, you know, have special insight into Hadley’s inner thinking, given that they are perhaps in the same foreign policy circles. Hiatt has written glowing articles about Hadley in the past, so, you know, this is fairly standard for him in terms of his worldview and his sort of milieu.

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Connor, we want to thank you for being with us, and we’ll certainly link to your report. Kevin is director and co-founder of the Public Accountability Initiative, co-author of the report called “Conflicts of Interest in the Syria Debate,” which was released last week.

By Robert Reich,

23 October 13

@ Robert Reich’s Blog

Conservative Republicans have lost their fight over the shutdown and debt ceiling, and they probably won’t get major spending cuts in upcoming negotiations over the budget.

But they’re winning the big one: How the nation understands our biggest domestic problem.

They say the biggest problem is the size of government and the budget deficit.

In fact our biggest problem is the decline of the middle class and increasing ranks of the poor, while almost all the economic gains go to the top.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that only 148,000 jobs were created in September – way down from the average of 207,000 new jobs a month in the first quarter of the year.

Many Americans have stopped looking for work. The official unemployment rate of 7.2 percent reflects only those who are still looking. If the same percentage of Americans were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, today’s unemployment rate would be 10.8 percent.

Meanwhile, 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. The real median household income continues to drop, and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.

So what’s Washington doing about this? Nothing. Instead, it’s back to debating how to cut the federal budget deficit.

The deficit shouldn’t even be an issue because it’s now almost down to the same share of the economy as it’s averaged over the last thirty years.

The triumph of right-wing Republicanism extends further. Failure to reach a budget agreement will restart the so-called “sequester” – automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that were passed in 2011 as a result of Congress’s last failure to agree on a budget.

These automatic cuts get tighter and tighter, year by year – squeezing almost everything the federal government does except for Social Security and Medicare. While about half the cuts come out of the defense budget, much of the rest come out of programs designed to help Americans in need: extended unemployment benefits; supplemental nutrition for women, infants and children; educational funding for schools in poor communities; Head Start; special education for students with learning disabilities; child-care subsidies for working families; heating assistance for poor families. The list goes on.

The biggest debate in Washington over the next few months will be whether to whack the federal budget deficit by cutting future entitlement spending and closing some tax loopholes, or go back to the sequester. Some choice.

The real triumph of the right has come in shaping the national conversation around the size of government and the budget deficit – thereby diverting attention from what’s really going on: the increasing concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top, while most Americans fall further and further behind.

Continuing cuts in the budget deficit – through the sequester or a deficit agreement – will only worsen this by reducing total demand for goods and services and by eliminating programs that hard-pressed Americans depend on.

The President and Democrats should re-frame the national conversation around widening inequality. They could start by demanding an increase in the minimum wage and a larger Earned Income Tax Credit. (The President doesn’t’ even have to wait for Congress to act. He can raise the minimum wage for government contractors through an executive order.)

Framing the central issue around jobs and inequality would make clear why it’s necessary to raise taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes (such as “carried interest,” which enables hedge-fund and private-equity managers to treat their taxable income as capital gains).

It would explain why we need to invest more in education – including early-childhood as well as affordable higher education.

This framework would even make the Affordable Care Act more understandable – as a means for helping working families whose jobs are paying less or disappearing altogether, and therefore in constant danger of losing health insurance.

The central issue of our time is the reality of widening inequality of income and wealth. Everything else – the government shutdown, the fight over the debt ceiling, the continuing negotiations over the budget deficit – is a dangerous distraction. The Right’s success in generating this distraction is its greatest, and most insidious, triumph.

By Robert Fisk

24 October, 2013

@ The Independent

The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations.

Saudi Arabia’s petulant refusal last week to take its place among non-voting members of the Security Council, an unprecedented step by any UN member, was intended to express the dictatorial monarchy’s displeasure with Washington’s refusal to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons in Damascus – but it also represented Saudi fears that Barack Obama might respond to Iranian overtures for better relations with the West.

The Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Bandar bin Sultan – a true buddy of President George W Bush during his 22 years as ambassador in Washington – has now rattled his tin drum to warn the Americans that Saudi Arabia will make a “major shift” in its relations with the US, not just because of its failure to attack Syria but for its inability to produce a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

What this “major shift” might be – save for the usual Saudi hot air about its independence from US foreign policy – was a secret that the prince kept to himself.

Israel, of course, never loses an opportunity to publicise – quite accurately – how closely many of its Middle East policies now coincide with those of the wealthy potentates of the Arab Gulf.

Hatred of the Shia/Alawite Syrian regime, an unquenchable suspicion of Shia Iran’s nuclear plans and a general fear of Shia expansion is turning the unelected Sunni Arab monarchies into proxy allies of the Israeli state they have often sworn to destroy. Hardly, one imagines, the kind of notion that Prince Bandar wishes to publicise.

Furthermore, America’s latest contribution to Middle East “peace” could be the sale of $10.8bn worth of missiles and arms to Sunni Saudi Arabia and the equally Sunni United Arab Emirates, including GBU-39 bombs – the weapons cutely called “bunker-busters” – which they could use against Shia Iran. Israel, of course, possesses the very same armaments.

Whether the hapless Mr Kerry – whose risible promise of an “unbelievably small” attack on Syria made him the laughing stock of the Middle East – understands the degree to which he is committing his country to the Sunni side in Islam’s oldest conflict is the subject of much debate in the Arab world. His response to the Saudi refusal to take its place in the UN Security Council has been almost as weird.

After lunch on Monday at the Paris home of the Saudi Foreign Minister, Saud al-Faisal, Kerry – via his usual anonymous officials – said that he valued the autocracy’s leadership in the region, shared Riyadh’s desire to de-nuclearise Iran and to bring an end to the Syrian war. But Kerry’s insistence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime must abandon power means that a Sunni government would take over Syria; and his wish to disarm Shia Iran – however notional its nuclear threat may be – would ensure that Sunni military power would dominate the Middle East from the Afghan border to the Mediterranean.

Few realise that Yemen constitutes another of the Saudi-Iranian battlegrounds in the region.

Saudi enthusiasm for Salafist groups in Yemen – including the Islah party, which is allegedly funded by Qatar, though it denies receiving any external support – is one reason why the post-Saleh regime in Sanaa has been supporting the Zaidi Shia Houthi “rebels” whose home provinces of Sa’adah, al Jawf and Hajja border Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are – according to the Sunni Saudis – supported by Iran.

The minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain – supported by the Saudis and of course by the compliant governments of the US, Britain, et al – is likewise accusing Shia Iran of colluding with the island’s majority Shias. Oddly, Prince Bandar, in his comments, claimed that Barack Obama had failed to support Saudi policy in Bahrain – which involved sending its own troops into the island to help repress Shia demonstrators in 2011 – when in fact America’s silence over the regime’s paramilitary violence was the nearest Washington could go in offering its backing to the Sunni minority and his Royal Highness the King of Bahrain.

All in all, then, a mighty Western love affair with Sunni Islam – a love that very definitely cannot speak its name in an Arab Gulf world in which “democracy”, “moderation”, “partnership” and outright dictatorship are interchangeable – which neither Washington nor London nor Paris (nor indeed Moscow or Beijing) will acknowledge. But, needless to say, there are a few irritating – and incongruous – ripples in this mutual passion.

The Saudis, for example, blame Obama for allowing Egypt’s decadent Hosni Mubarak to be overthrown. They blame the Americans for supporting the elected Muslim Brother Mohamed Morsi as president – elections not being terribly popular in the Gulf – and the Saudis are now throwing cash at Egypt’s new military regime. Assad in Damascus also offered his congratulations to the Egyptian military. Was the Egyptian army not, after all – like Assad himself – trying to prevent religious extremists from taking power?

Fair enough – providing we remember that the Saudis are really supporting the Egyptian Salafists who cynically gave their loyalty to the Egyptian military, and that Saudi-financed Salafists are among the fiercest opponents of Assad.

Thankfully for Kerry and his European mates, the absence of any institutional memory in the State Department, Foreign Office or Quai d’Orsay means that no one need remember that 15 of the 19 mass-killers of 9/11 were also Salafists and – let us above all, please God, forget this – were all Sunni citizens of Saudi Arabia.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

By  Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

24 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

The story of Fukushima should be on the front pages of every newspaper. Instead, it is rarely mentioned. The problems at Fukushima are unprecedented in human experience and involve a high risk of radiation events larger than any that the global community has ever experienced. It is going to take the best engineering minds in the world to solve these problems and to diminish their global impact.

When we researched the realities of Fukushima in preparation for this article, words like apocalyptic, cataclysmic and Earth-threatening came to mind. But, when we say such things, people react as if we were the little red hen screaming “the sky is falling” and the reports are ignored. So, we’re going to present what is known in this article and you can decide whether we are facing a potentially cataclysmic event.

Either way, it is clear that the problems at Fukushima demand that the world’s best nuclear engineers and other experts advise and assist in the efforts to solve them. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of  Fairewinds.org  and an international team of scientists created a  15-point plan  to address the crises at Fukushima.

A subcommittee of the  Green Shadow Cabinet  (of which we are members), which includes long-time nuclear activist  Harvey Wasserman , is circulating a sign-on letter and a  petition  calling on the United Nations and Japanese government to put in place the Gundersen et al plan and to provide 24-hour media access to information about the crises at Fukushima. There is also a call for international days of action on the weekend of November 9 and 10. The letter and petitions will be delivered to the UN on November 11 which is both Armistice Day and the 32 nd  month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The Problems of Fukushima

There are three major problems at Fukushima: (1) Three reactor cores are missing; (2) Radiated water has been leaking from the plant in mass quantities for 2.5 years; and (3) Eleven thousand spent nuclear fuel rods, perhaps the most dangerous things ever created by humans, are stored at the plant and need to be removed, 1,533 of those are in a very precarious and dangerous position. Each of these three could result in dramatic radiation events, unlike any radiation exposure humans have ever experienced.  We’ll discuss them in order, saving the most dangerous for last.

Missing reactor cores:  Since the accident at Fukushima on March 11, 2011, three reactor cores have gone missing.  There was an unprecedented three reactor ‘melt-down.’ These  melted cores , called corium lavas, are thought to have passed through the basements of reactor buildings 1, 2 and 3, and to be somewhere in the ground underneath.

Harvey Wasserman, who has been working on nuclear energy issues for over 40 years,  tells us  that during those four decades no one ever talked about the possibility of a multiple meltdown, but that is what occurred at Fukushima.

It is an unprecedented situation to not know where these cores are. TEPCO is pouring water where they think the cores are, but they are not sure. There are occasional  steam eruptions  coming from the grounds of the reactors, so the cores are thought to still be hot.

The concern is that the corium lavas will enter or may have already entered the aquifer below the plant. That would contaminate a much larger area with radioactive elements. Some suggest that it would require the area surrounding Tokyo,  40 million people , to be evacuated. Another concern is that if the corium lavas enter the aquifer,  they could create  a “super-heated pressurized steam reaction beneath a layer of caprock causing a major ‘hydrovolcanic’ explosion.”

A further concern is that a  large reserve of groundwater  which is coming in contact with the corium lavas is migrating towards the ocean at the rate of four meters per month. This  could release greater amounts  of radiation than were released in the early days of the disaster.

Radioactive water leaking into the Pacific Ocean:  TEPCO did not admit that  leaks of radioactive water  were occurring until July of this year. Shunichi Tanaka the head of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority finally  told reporters  this July that radioactive water has been leaking into the Pacific Ocean since the disaster hit over two years ago. This is the  largest single contribution of radionuclides to the marine environment ever observed  according to  a report by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety .  The Japanese government finally admitted that the situation was urgent this September – an emergency they did not acknowledge until 2.5 years after the water problem began.

How much radioactive water is leaking into the ocean? An estimated 300 tons (71,895 gallons/272,152 liters) of contaminated water is flowing into the ocean every day.  The first radioactive ocean plume  released by the Fukushima nuclear power plant  disaster will take three years to reach the shores of the United States.  This means, according  to a new study from the University of New South Wales , the United States will experience the first radioactive water coming to its shores sometime in early 2014.

One month after Fukushima, the  FDA announced it was going to stop testing fish in the Pacific Ocean for radiation .  But, independent research is showing that  every bluefin tuna tested in the waters off California has been contaminated  with radiation that originated in Fukushima. Daniel Madigan, the marine ecologist who led the Stanford University study from May of 2012 was quoted in the  Wall Street Journal saying, “The tuna packaged it up (the radiation) and brought it across the world’s largest ocean. We were definitely surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we measured.” Marine biologist Nicholas Fisher of Stony Brook University in New York State, another member of the study group, said: “We found that absolutely every one of them had comparable concentrations of cesium 134 and cesium 137.”

In addition,  Science reports  that fish near Fukushima are being found to have high levels of the radioactive isotope, cesium-134. The levels found in these fish are not decreasing,  which indicates that radiation-polluted water continues to leak into the ocean. At least 42 fish species from the area around the plant are considered unsafe.  South Korea has banned Japanese fish  as a result of the ongoing leaks.

The half-life (time it takes for half of the element to decay) of cesium 134 is 2.0652 years. For cesium 137, the half-life is 30.17 years. Cesium does not sink to the ocean floor, so fish swim through it. What are  the human impacts of cesium ?

When contact with radioactive cesium occurs, which is highly unlikely, a person can experience cell damage due to radiation of the cesium particles. Due to this, effects such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding may occur. When the exposure lasts a long time, people may even lose consciousness. Coma or even death may then follow. How serious the effects are depends upon the resistance of individual persons and the duration of exposure and the concentration a person is exposed to, experts say.

There is no end in sight from the leakage of radioactive water into the Pacific from Fukushima.  Harvey Wasserman is questioning whether fishing in the Pacific Ocean will be safe after years of leakage from Fukushima.  The  World Health Organization (WHO) is claiming  that this will have limited effect on human health, with concentrations predicted to be below WHO safety levels. However,  experts seriously question  the WHO’s claims.

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation is in the process of writing a report  to assess the radiation doses and associated effects on health and environment. When finalized, it will be the most comprehensive scientific analysis of the information available to date examining how much radioactive material was released, how it was dispersed over land and water, how Fukushima compares to previous accidents, what the impact is on the environment and food, and what the impact is on human health and the environment.

Wasserman warns that “dilution is no solution.”  The fact that the Pacific Ocean is large does not change the fact that these radioactive elements have long half-lives.  Radiation in water is taken up by vegetation, then smaller fish eat the vegetation, larger fish eat the smaller fish and at the top of the food chain we will find fish like tuna, dolphin and whales with concentrated levels of radiation. Humans at the top of the food chain could be eating these contaminated fish.

As bad as the ongoing leakage of radioactive water is into the Pacific, that is not the largest part of the water problem.  The  Asia-Pacific Journal reported last month  that TEPCO has 330,000 tons of water stored in 1,000 above-ground tanks and an undetermined amount in underground storage tanks.  Every day, 400 tons of water comes to the site from the mountains, 300 tons of that is the source for the contaminated water leaking into the Pacific daily. It is not clear where the rest of this water goes.

Each day TEPCO injects 400 tons of water into the destroyed facilities to keep them cool; about half is recycled, and the rest goes into the above-ground tanks. They are constantly building new storage tanks for this radioactive water. The tanks being used for storage were put together rapidly and are already leaking. They expect to have 800,000 tons of radioactive water stored on the site by 2016.  Harvey Wasserman warns that these unstable tanks are at risk of rupture if there is another earthquake or storm that hits Fukushima. The Asia-Pacific Journal concludes: “So at present there is no real solution to the water problem.”

The most recent news on the water problem at Fukushima adds to the concerns. On October 11, 2013, TEPCO disclosed that the  radioactivity level spiked 6,500 times  at a Fukushima well.  “TEPCO said the findings show that radioactive substances like strontium have reached the groundwater. High levels of tritium, which transfers much easier in water than strontium, had already been detected.”

Spent Fuel Rods:  As bad as the problems of radioactive water and missing cores are, the biggest problem at Fukushima comes from the spent fuel rods.  The plant has been in operation for 40 years. As a result, they are storing 11 thousand spent fuel rods on the grounds of the Fukushima plant. These fuel rods are composed of highly radioactive materials such as plutonium and uranium. They are about the width of a thumb and about 15 feet long.

The biggest and most immediate challenge is the  1,533 spent fuel rods  packed tightly in a pool four floors above Reactor 4.  Before the storm hit, those rods had been removed for routine maintenance of the reactor.  But, now they are stored 100 feet in the air in damaged racks.   They weigh a total of 400 tons and contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times  the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

The building in which these rods are stored has been damaged. TEPCO reinforced it with a steel frame, but the building itself is buckling and sagging, vulnerable to collapse if another earthquake or storm hits the area. Additionally, the ground under and around the building is becoming saturated with water, which further undermines the integrity of the structure and could cause it to tilt.

How dangerous are these fuel rods?  Harvey Wasserman explains that the fuel rods are clad in zirconium which  can ignite if they lose coolant . They could also ignite or explode if rods break or hit each other. Wasserman reports that some say this could result in a fission explosion like an atomic bomb, others say that is not what would happen, but agree it would be “a reaction like we have never seen before, a nuclear fire releasing incredible amounts of radiation,” says Wasserman.

These are not the only spent fuel rods at the plant, they are just the most precarious.  There are 11,000 fuel rods scattered around the plant,  6,000 in a cooling pool less than 50 meters  from the sagging Reactor 4.  If a fire erupts in the spent fuel pool at Reactor 4, it could ignite the rods in the cooling pool and lead to an even greater release of radiation. It could set off a chain reaction that could not be stopped.

What would happen? Wasserman reports that the plant would have to be evacuated.  The workers who are essential to preventing damage at the plant would leave, and we will have lost a critical safeguard.  In addition, the computers will not work because of the intense radiation. As a result we would be blind – the world would have to sit and wait to see what happened. You might have to not only evacuate Fukushima but all of the population in and around Tokyo, reports Wasserman.

There is no question that the 1,533 spent fuel rods need to be removed.  But Arnie Gundersen, a veteran nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds  Energy Education , who used to build fuel assemblies,  told Reuters  “They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods.”  He described the problem  in a radio interview:

“If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out — but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November, December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated, they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing.”

Wasserman builds on the analogy, telling us it is “worse than pulling cigarettes out of a crumbled cigarette pack.” It is likely they used salt water as a coolant out of desperation, which would cause corrosion because the rods were never meant to be in salt water.  The condition of the rods is unknown. There is debris in the coolant, so there has been some crumbling from somewhere. Gundersen   adds , “The roof has fallen in, which further distorted the racks,” noting that if a fuel rod snaps, it will release radioactive gas which will require at a minimum evacuation of the plant. They will release those gases into the atmosphere and try again.

The Japan Times  writes : “The consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan — including Tokyo and Yokohama — and even neighboring countries at serious risk.”

This is not the usual moving of fuel rods.  TEPCO has been saying this is routine, but in fact it is unique – a feat of engineering never done before.  As Gundersen says:

“Tokyo Electric is portraying this as easy. In a normal nuclear reactor, all of this is done with computers. Everything gets pulled perfectly vertically. Well nothing is vertical anymore, the fuel racks are distorted, it’s all going to have to be done manually. The net effect is it’s a really difficult job. It wouldn’t surprise me if they snapped some of the fuel and they can’t remove it.”

Gregory Jaczko, Former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission concurs  with Gundersen describing the removal of the spent fuel rods as “a very significant activity, and . . . very, very unprecedented.”

Wasserman sums the challenge up: “We are doing something never done before – bent, crumbling, brittle fuel rods being removed from a pool that is compromised, in a building that is sinking, sagging and buckling, and it all must done under manual control, not with computers.”  And the potential damage from failure would affect hundreds of millions of people.

The Solutions

The three major problems at Fukushima are all unprecedented, each unique in their own way and each has the potential for major damage to humans and the environment. There are no clear solutions but there are steps that need to be taken urgently to get the Fukushima clean-up and de-commissioning on track and minimize the risks.

The first thing that is needed is to end the media blackout.  The global public needs to be informed about the issues the world faces from Fukushima.  The impacts of Fukushima could affect almost everyone on the planet, so we all have a stake in the outcome.  If the public is informed about this problem, the political will to resolve it will rapidly develop.

The nuclear industry, which wants to continue to expand, fears Fukushima being widely discussed because it undermines their already weak economic potential.  But, the profits of the nuclear industry are of minor concern compared to the risks of the triple Fukushima challenges.

The second thing that must be faced is the incompetence of TEPCO.  They are not capable of handling this triple complex crisis.  TEPCO “is already  Japan’s most distrusted firm” and has been exposed as “dangerously incompetent.”   A poll found that 91 percent of the Japanese public wants the government to intervene at Fukushima.

Tepco’s management of the stricken power plant has been described as  a comedy of errors . The constant stream of mistakes has been made worse by constant false denials and efforts to minimize major problems. Indeed the entire Fukushima catastrophe could have been avoided:

“Tepco at first blamed the accident on ‘an unforeseen massive tsunami’ triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Then it admitted it had in fact foreseen just such a scenario but hadn’t done anything about it.”

The reality is Fukushima was plagued by human error from the outset.  An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a  “man-made” disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and Tepco and bad reactor design . On this point, TEPCO is not alone, this is an industry-wide problem. Many US nuclear plants have serious problems, are being operated beyond their life span, have the same design problems and are near earthquake faults. Regulatory officials in both the US and Japan are too corruptly tied to the industry.

Then, the meltdown itself was denied for months, with TEPCO claiming it had not been confirmed.   Japan Times reports  that “in December 2011, the government announced that the plant had reached ‘a state of cold shutdown.’ Normally, that means radiation releases are under control and the temperature of its nuclear fuel is consistently below boiling point.”  Unfortunately, the statement was false – the reactors continue to need water to keep them cool, the fuel rods need to be kept cool – there has been no cold shutdown.

TEPCO has done a terrible job of cleaning up the plant.  Japan Times describes some of the problems:

“The plant is being run on makeshift equipment and breakdowns are endemic. Among nearly a dozen serious problems since April this year there have been successive power outages, leaks of highly radioactive water from underground water pools — and a rat that chewed enough wires to short-circuit a switchboard, causing a power outage that interrupted cooling for nearly 30 hours. Later, the cooling system for a fuel-storage pool had to be switched off for safety checks when two dead rats were found in a transformer box.”

TEPCO has been  constantly cutting financial corners  and not spending enough to solve the challenges of the Fukushima disaster resulting  in shoddy practices  that cause environmental damage. Washington’s Blog reports that the Japanese government is spreading radioactivity throughout Japan – and other countries – by  burning radioactive waste  in incinerators not built to handle such toxic substances.  Workers have expressed concerns  and even apologized for following order regarding the ‘clean-up.’

Indeed, the workers are another serious concern.  The Guardian reported  in October 2013 the plummeting morale of workers, problems of alcohol abuse, anxiety, loneliness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. TEPCO cut the pay of its workers by 20 percent in 2011 to save money even though these workers are doing very difficult work and face constant problems. Outside of work, many were traumatized by being forced to evacuate their homes after the Tsunami; and they have no idea how exposed to radiation they have been and what health consequences they will suffer. Contractors are hired based on the lowest bid, resulting in low wages for workers. According to the Guardian, Japan’s top nuclear regulator, Shunichi Tanaka, told reporters: “Mistakes are often linked to morale. People usually don’t make silly, careless mistakes when they’re motivated and working in a positive environment. The lack of it, I think, may be related to the recent problems.”

The history of TEPCO shows we cannot trust this company and its mistreated workforce to handle the complex challenges faced at Fukushima. The crisis at Fukushima is a global one, requiring a global solution.

In an  open letter to the United Nations , 16 top nuclear experts urged the government of Japan to transfer responsibility for the Fukushima reactor site to a worldwide engineering group overseen by a civil society panel and an international group of nuclear experts independent from TEPCO and the International Atomic Energy Administration , IAEA. They urge that the stabilization, clean-up and de-commissioning of the plant be well-funded. They make this request with “urgency” because the situation at the Fukushima plant is “progressively deteriorating, not stabilizing.”

Beyond the clean-up, they are also critical of the estimates by the World Health Organization and IAEA of the health and environmental damage caused by the Fukushima disaster and they recommend more accurate methods of accounting, as well as the gathering of data to ensure more accurate estimates. They also want to see the people displaced by Fukushima treated in better ways; and they urge that the views of indigenous people who never wanted the uranium removed from their lands be respected in the future as their views would have prevented this disaster.

Facing Reality

The problems at Fukushima are in large part about facing reality – seeing the challenges, risks and potential harms from the incident. It is about TEPCO and Japan facing the reality that they are not equipped to handle the challenges of Fukushima and need the world to join the effort.

Facing reality is a common problem throughout the nuclear industry and those who continue to push for nuclear energy. Indeed, it is a problem with many energy issues. We must face the reality of the long-term damage being done to the planet and the people by the carbon-nuclear based energy economy.

Another reality the nuclear industry must face is that the United States is turning away from nuclear energy and the world will do the same. As  Gregory Jaczko , who chaired the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of the Fukushima incident says “I’ve never seen a movie that’s set 200 years in the future and the planet is being powered by fission reactors—that’s nobody’s vision of the future. This is not a future technology.” He sees US nuclear reactors as aging, many in operation beyond their original lifespan.  The  economics of nuclear energy are increasingly difficult  as it is a very expensive source of energy.  Further, there is no money or desire to finance new nuclear plants. “The industry is going away,” he said bluntly.

Ralph Nader describes  nuclear energy as “unnecessary, uneconomic, uninsurable, unevacuable and, most importantly, unsafe.”  He argues it only continues to exist because the nuclear lobby pushes politicians to protect it. The point made by Nader about the inability to evacuate if there is a nuclear accident is worth underlining.  Wasserman points out that there are nuclear plants in the US that are near earthquake faults, among them are plants near Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, DC.  And, Fukushima was based on a design by General Electric, which was also used to build 23 reactors in the US.

If we faced reality, public officials would be organizing evacuation drills in those cities.  If we did so, Americans would quickly learn that if there is a serious nuclear accident, US cities could not be evacuated. Activists making the reasonable demand for evacuation drills may be a very good strategy to end nuclear power.

Wasserman emphasizes that as bad as Fukushima is, it is not the worst case scenario for a nuclear disaster. Fukushima was 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the center of the earthquake. If that had been 20 kilometers (12 miles), the plant would have been reduced to rubble and caused an immediate nuclear catastrophe.

Another reality we need to face is a very positive one, Wasserman points out “All of our world’s energy needs could be met by solar, wind, thermal, ocean technology.” His point is repeated by many top energy experts, in fact  a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy is not only possible, it is inevitable .  The only question is how long it will take for us to get there, and how much damage will be done before we end the “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that emphasizes carbon and nuclear energy sources.

Naoto Kan, prime minister of Japan when the disaster began,  recently told an audience  that he had been a supporter of nuclear power, but after the Fukushima accident, “I changed my thinking 180-degrees, completely.” He realized that “no other accident or disaster” other than a nuclear plant disaster can “affect 50 million people . . . no other accident could cause such a tragedy.” He pointed out that all 54 nuclear plants in Japan have now been closed and expressed confidently that “without nuclear power plants we can absolutely provide the energy to meet our demands.”  In fact, since the disaster Japan has tripled its use of solar energy, to the equivalent of three nuclear plants. He believes: “If humanity really would work together . . . we could generate all our energy through renewable energy.”

To take action,  click here .

Related articles by Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese:

Carbon-Free, Nuclear-Free Energy Economy Is Inevitable

Vibrant Movement for Green Energy Economy

Gang Green or Fresh Greens?

US Climate Bomb is Ticking: What the Gas Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know

America’s Secret Fukushima Poisoning the Bread Basket of the World

The Rule of Law in Times of Ecological Collapse – Truthout

Dirty Energy’s Dirty Tactics: Boulder on the Front Lines of the Renewable Energy Future

To hear Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers interview with Harvey Wasserman of NukeFree.org  Fukushima – A Global Threat That Requires a Global Response  click here .

This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of publication.

Kevin Zeese JD and Margaret Flowers MD co-host  ClearingtheFOGRadio.org  on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC and on  Economic Democracy Media  and on  UStream.TV/ItsOurEconomy , co-direct  It’s Our Economy  and are organizers of  PopularResistance.org . Their twitters are @KBZeese and @MFlowers8.

By Kourosh Ziabari

24 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

With the recommencement of nuclear talks between Iran and the six world powers, hopes have been revived that more than a decade of conflict and dispute between the two sides can finally come to an end and the concerns over the possible diversion of Iran’s nuclear activities toward an atomic weapon will be completely allayed.

The international observers hailed the latest round of nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States) on October 15 and 16 in Geneva as constructive, calling it a step forward on the path of finding a conclusive and definite resolution for Iran’s nuclear standoff.

The Iranian negotiators demanded that the contents of the talks remain undisclosed until an agreement is reached. Their demand sounds reasonable as it will prevent the mass media from spreading falsehood regarding the details of the agreement yet to be reached and also impede the efforts made by the extremist and neo-conservative elements in the Western governments to bring the negotiations to a dead-end.

During the talks, Iran presented a three-phased PowerPoint proposal in English language entitled “Closing Unnecessary Crisis, Opening New Horizons” which drew a roadmap for the future of the talks. According to the proposal, Iran would remove the concerns of the P5+1 group of world countries through confidence-building measures and increased transparency in its nuclear activities, and in return, the Western powers will offer incentives to Iran by lifting the unilateral and multilateral sanctions on a step-by-step basis.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told the reporters following the conclusion of talks in Geneva that “the negotiations will be done in the negotiating room, and not in the press.” He said that Iran is not after creating some kind of media hype over its proposal and rather takes a down-to-earth and practical approach toward the talks.

Iran’s presentation was welcomed by the P5+1. According to Reuters, Michael Mann, the spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said Iran made a “very useful” presentation during the talks. Even the United States that usually expressed disappointment over the nuclear talks with Iran in the past couldn’t hide its tacit satisfaction with the Iranian proposal. “The Iranian proposal was a new proposal with a level of seriousness and substance that we had not seen before,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

A senior U.S. State Department official also praised the negotiations, saying that “for the first time, we had very detailed technical discussions”

The British Catherine Ashton who became the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union in 2009 and took lead as the coordinator of P5+1 in talks with Iran also underlined her “cautious optimism” but “a real sense of determination” toward the new round of negotiations with Iran.

Since the details of the Iranian proposal didn’t leak out and especially after Iran rejected the allegations made by the Israeli military intelligence website, Debka File, that had claimed to be possessing information on the contents of the proposal put forward by Iran, it’s not sensible to make suggestions and gossips on what Iran has offered to the West, but what is clear is that Iran will be making reasonable compromises, in a balanced manner, which will not sacrifice its nuclear rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but ease the tensions with the West, and this is something which seems to be completely logical and fair. On the other side, what the Iranian nation expects to be high on the agenda of the P5+1 is the complete removal of the economic sanctions that have caused serious damages to their lives.

The sanctions which were imposed upon Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, especially following the escalation of controversy over Iran’s nuclear program in the past decade, are so diverse and extensive that it’s virtually impossible to elaborate on all of them in a single article, but it is worth alluding to some of them in passing. These sanctions have had such devastative impacts on the Iranian people that even a large number of American officials, think tanks and advocacy groups have called on the U.S. government and its European allies to freeze them.

As an instance, the banking sanctions, which disrupt and block Iran’s access to international financing systems have prevented the Iranian companies from importing vital medicine for chronic disorders, and the Iranian patients suffering from different types of cancer, hemophilia, thalassemia, hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and psychiatric disorders are struggling with dire conditions resulting from their inability to find medicine for their diseases.

According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Commerce on February 8, 2013, the exports of pharmaceutical products to Iran had decreased by half. This is while the United States claims that it doesn’t block the exports of medicine to Iran and that it has issued some licenses for the sale of medical goods and foodstuff to Iran; however, there have been several reports of deaths as a result of the scarcity or shortage of foreign-produced medicine in Iran. Even those patients who can find the medicine they need should buy them at extremely higher prices than before, simply because they are being imported through intermediaries and third parties, and this is the direct, undeniable impact of the anti-Iran sanctions.

The U.S.-based news, analysis website Al-Monitor published a report on July 29, 2013, detailing the pain and suffering of the Iranian patients who are grappling with the problem of finding medicine for their diseases.

Hessam, a 27-year-old veterinary student with MS told Al-Monitor, “I have managed to buy Rebif every month, but the price has tripled over the past year.” He added, “Those who need to use other Western-made medicines, like Avonex and Betaferon, have been facing extremely serious problems buying them. Betaferon’s price has risen from 980,000 rials [$40] to 16,000,000 rials [$649] a box. You cannot find them even at this price at any drugstores.”

The insufficiency of medicine and pharmaceutical products in Iran as a result of the sanctions is a fact endorsed and confirmed by different outlets. Joy Gordon wrote in an article for the Foreign Policy on October 18, 2013 that the sanctions have complicated the health conditions of the Iranian patients and are leading to a kind of humanitarian crisis which the International Crisis Group has also verified in a detailed, 70-page report published in February 2013 about the consequences and impacts of the anti-Iran sanctions.

“The most effective medicines to treat cancer and AIDS, which are manufactured only by Western pharmaceutical companies, can no longer be gotten within Iran. Ordinary commerce, as a matter of necessity, is now deeply dependent on the international criminal network in order to function at all,” wrote Joy Gordon in the Foreign Policy’s “The Middle East Channel” blog.

Citing reports published by Iran’s major pharmacies, BBC Persian published a report on November 11, 2012 that a 350% increase in the price of imported medicine had taken place at that time, and the majority of experts and analysts attribute this surge in the medicine prices to the sanctions.

However, the human costs of the sanctions are not limited to the difficulties they create in terms of medical shortages for the ordinary people. The devaluation of Iran’s national currency, rial, as a result of the sanctions, has made it extremely difficult for thousands of Iranian students studying in the foreign universities to afford their tuition and accommodation fees. Their families in Iran cannot deposit into their accounts considerable amounts of financial assistance and many of such students have chosen to return to Iran to continue their education. The depreciation of rial has also made it quite unreachable for the Iranian citizens to travel abroad for personal purposes since the air fares have increased almost threefold in the past 3 years and many European carriers have stopped their flights to or from Iran.

At any rate, they are the ordinary Iranian citizens who bear the brunt of the sanctions against their country, and one of their major demands is the complete lifting of all the unilateral, multilateral and private sanctions. This demand was echoed in their election of Dr. Hassan Rouhani as the Iranian President who had promised to work toward persuading the West to lift all the sanctions.

Iran and the P5+1 are slated to meet once again on November 7 and 8. Before the main meeting, nuclear and sanctions experts from the two sides will hold technical meetings to reach a consensus over a systematic framework for putting into practice the agreements reached in the first meeting in Geneva.

It’s not in the interests of the six world powers to continue pushing for new sanctions, as some Republicans of the U.S. Congress did, or leaving the previous sanctions in place. It will not contribute to the course of negotiations positively and will simply add to the suffering and economic woes of the Iranian people and will further complicate the disputes.

The most rational decision which the United States and its European allies can take is to lift the sanctions for two reasons: first, to respect the demands of the Iranian people who feel it’s not righteous and justifiable to be under the pressure of unfair and cruel sanctions that are violating their basic rights according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, and secondly because the lifting of the sanctions will be a great step on the path of striking a deal with Iran to close the nuclear dossier forever.

Kourosh Ziabari

Journalist, writer and media correspondent

www.KouroshZiabari.com

Israel continues to threaten Iran, despite the new dawn in Iranian diplomacy spearheaded by President Rouhani.

By Akbar Ganji

22 Oct 2013

@ Al Jazeera

During his eight-year presidency Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly used inhumane and absurd language to speak about the existence of Israel and cast doubt on the catastrophic events of the Holocaust, and by doing so he served extremists such as Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu well, to the extent that he was favoured by many Israeli officials in the presidential elections of 2009.

Netanyahu, who is the biggest loser in the outcome of Iran’s last presidential elections, called President Hassan Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, alleging that he smiles while building a nuclear bomb.

In my recent article, Iran’s olive branch, I demonstrate the fallacy of Netanyahu’s arguments. The fact is that Netanyahu and his government have tried to bring the Iran “nuclear threat” to the foreground in order to sideline other major issues, including the continued occupation of Palestinian lands and denying citizenship rights to its inhabitants. The fact that has been neglected is that Israel has been building hundreds of nuclear warheads and it threatens Iran with military attacks.

Iran’s nuclear bomb is a product of Israel’s propaganda. Since 1992, Netanyahu and current Israeli President Shimon Peres have repeatedly claimed that Iran will build a nuclear weapon over the next few years. Here are  two out of many examples:

1992: Israeli parliamentarian Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is three to five years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – and that the threat had to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the US”.

1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999. “Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East,” Peres warned, “because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy.”

After 21 years, Netanyahu is now declaring that if Iran possesses 250kg of uranium enriched at 20 percent, Israel will bomb its nuclear sites. This is while Israel possesses up to 200 nuclear warheads and is not a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). According to newly-released documents, 50 years ago,  Israel secretly received thousands of kilograms of “yellow cake”, an essential product for fueling nuclear weapons, from Argentina. Israel continues to build nuclear weapons without any monitoring or inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

On the other hand, Iran is a signatory to the NPT, and is under close monitoring and inspection by the IAEA.  Further, according to the NPT, member states are entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear technology, including uranium enrichment.

A history of military threats against Iran

Israel has repeatedly tried to provoke the US into attacking Iran. In an interview with the Times of London on November 5, 2002, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to persuade the US to attack Iran. Calling Iran a “centre of world terror” that is pursuing nuclear weapons, Sharon insisted that the US put pressure on Tehran, the “day after action against Baghdad ends”.

In April 2003, Daniel Ayalon, then Israeli ambassador to the US, called for regime change in Iran and Syria, claiming in a conference that “it [the US] has to follow through.” In the same year, other Israeli officials spoke repeatedly about the possibility of Israeli unilateral attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites. Then Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz warned that “under no circumstances would Israel be able to tolerate nuclear weapons in Iranian possession.”

In January 2005, Seymour Hersh reported, “The Defence Department civilians, under the leadership of [Under-secretary of Defence for Policy] Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran.”

In April 2005, Sharon said, “Israel – and not only Israel – cannot accept a nuclear Iran. We have the ability to deal with this and we’re making all the necessary preparations to be ready for such a situation.”Sharon had reportedly ordered the IDF to develop plans for attacking Iran by March 2006. In the same month, when the IDF chief Dan Halutz was asked, how far Israel was willing to go to stop Iran’s nuclear program, he responded, “two thousand kilometres,” meaning Tehran. In response to Ahmadinejad’s infamous and incorrectly translated statement that “Israel must be wiped off the map,” Peres said, “Iran can also be wiped off the map.”

After a meeting in July 2009 with then US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister, said that attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is an option, adding, “We clearly believe that no option should be removed from the table. This is our policy; we mean it. We recommend to others to take the same position ….”

Barak and Netanyahu were determined to attack Iran in 2010, but were thwarted by the military and intelligence establishments within Israel. In November 2012, Netanyahu again threatened Iran with military attacks, even if the US does not go along.

On June 19 Moshe Ya’alon, Netanyahu’s new Defense Minister called for “significant increase in pressure by Western countries to lead Iran to the dilemma of either having a bomb or surviving.”

In the latest of such provocations, in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on August 9, Barak emphasised again that attacking Iran is a serious option for Israel. He added that Iran must be made to understand, either behind closed doors or publicly, that the military option is serious, and if they cross the red line [set by Netanyahu], military attacks will prevent them from building nuclear weapons.

Israel is the real threat

Even if Iran wanted to, it lacks the capability to attack Israel. The Jerusalem Post reported on April 28 that in a meeting in New York, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert talked about Netanyahu’s claims about Iran’s nuclear capability and said, “I think that we have exaggerated, for a long time, the potential threat of Iran possessing nuclear power.”

In a research paper released by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, military analyst Anthony Cordesman stated that “Israel now poses a more serious existential threat to Iran than Iran can pose to Israel in the near term.” Adding, “Israel long ago extended the range of its nuclear-armed, land-based missiles, probably now targets Iran with thermonuclear weapons, and is examining options for sea launched cruise missiles.”  And according to the CSIS report, “A mix of several air and ground bursts in an Israeli thermonuclear or high fission yield attack on five key cities – Tehran (capital) 7.19 million; Mashhad 2.592 million; Esfahan 1.704 million; Karaj 1.531 million; Tabriz 1.459 million – would probably destroy Iran as a nation in anything like its current form.”

Through its powerful lobby, Israel has succeeded in convincing the US Senate to unanimously pass a resolution that stated that if Israel attacked Iran, the US must help it. Senate Resolution 65 declared that:

“If the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.”

Before the recent diplomatic opening at the United Nations General Assembly meetings, there was even speculation about a secret agreement between the US and Israel whereby, in return for renewed negotiations with the Palestinians, the US will not oppose Israel’s attacks on Iran as strongly as in the past. John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Fox Business Network on July 29, that Netanyahu agreed to release 104 Palestinian prisoners because he wants to be able to tell Obama, “I have done everything you asked me on the Israel-Palestinian question, despite the political cost, now I want you to stand with me against Iran.”

The facts on the ground

Israel has hundreds of nuclear warheads, but Netanyahu does not recognise Iran’s right to enrich uranium within the NPT framework. The IDF chief, Lt Gen Benny Gantz, has said that he does not believe Iran will build a nuclear weapon. He was quoted as saying, “I don’t think [Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] will want to go the extra mile. I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.”

In fact Khamenei’s suggestion for resolving the problem between Israel and the Palestinians is to hold a referendum on the future of all of the Palestinian territories in which Israelis and Palestinians, including those that are refugees, can vote. Regardless of how one thinks about the plausibility of such a proposal, he believes that because Palestinians will be in the majority, they will liberate their nation – akin to what happened in South Africa – in which the Jewish people can also live in peace.

Netanyahu staged the last episode of this two-decade-old campaign of constructing an image of Iran as the most imminent global threat on October 1, during his UNGA speech. He devoted 214 words – less than seven percent of his speech – to the main issue, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in those words he set two conditions for the Palestinians: Recognise Israel as a “Jewish state”, and thus formally accept second-class citizenship for those 25 percent of the population of Israel who are not Jews; and accept a “demilitarised” Palestinian state. He did not mention anything about the illegal settlements in the occupied territories, status of the borders or the refugees. That is the kind of “painful compromise” he intends to make on the Palestinian issue.

The speech was meant to portray the conflict as a four-thousand-year-old story of wars among prophets, kings, ancient empires and catastrophic events. Elevating a conflict over land and water and other resources to the realm of God and prophets is the best way of mystifying the political reality of a 46-year-old occupation of land and collective punishment of its people, and, in the same act, making the resolution of the conflict impossible. That is the rationale behind the magnification of the “Iranian menace”.

In the same speech Netanyahu again threatened Iran with military attacks. In his numerous speeches and interviews while in New York, Netanyahu claimed that Iran is after the destruction of Israel by creating another Holocaust.

To justify military aggression against Iran – who unlike Israel, has not attacked another country for almost 300 years – Netanyahu constantly likens Iran to Nazi Germany – see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Iranians are deeply worried about a possible Israeli military attack. Even if such an attack is restricted to Iran’s nuclear facilities, the resulting radiation and contamination will kill a large number of people. An extensive study by Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman of CSIS, shows that attacking Iran’s nuclear sites will kill and injure hundreds of thousands of people. It will also release radioactive nuclear materials in the air, farms, and groundwater resources. Another study by Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher of Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London concluded that attacking Iran’s nuclear and chemical sites could kill over 2 million people.

The Middle East needs peace, not instability, war, enmity, inequality, and double standards. Without security and peace, democracy and respect for human rights will be marginalised.

Akbar Ganji is one of Iran’s leading political dissidents and has received over a dozen human rights awards for his efforts. Imprisoned in Iran until 2006, he is author of one book in English, The Road to Democracy in Iran, which lays out a strategy for a nonviolent transition to democracy in Iran.

By William J. Astore

21 September, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Disaster Capitalism on the Battlefield and in the Boardroom

There is a new normal in America: our government may shut down, but our wars continue. Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the U.S. military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan War can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” back in Rome), Africa can be used as an imperial playground (as in the late nineteenth century “scramble for Africa,” but with the U.S. and China doing the scrambling this time around), and the military-industrial complex can still dominate the world’s arms trade.

In the halls of Congress and the Pentagon, it’s business as usual, if your definition of “business” is the power and profits you get from constantly preparing for and prosecuting wars around the world. “War is a racket,” General Smedley Butler famously declared in 1935, and even now it’s hard to disagree with a man who had two Congressional Medals of Honor to his credit and was intimately familiar with American imperialism.

War Is Politics, Right?

Once upon a time, as a serving officer in the U.S. Air Force, I was taught that Carl von Clausewitz had defined war as a continuation of politics by other means. This definition is, in fact, a simplification of his classic and complex book, On War, written after his experiences fighting Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.

The idea of war as a continuation of politics is both moderately interesting and dangerously misleading: interesting because it connects war to political processes and suggests that they should be fought for political goals; misleading because it suggests that war is essentially rational and so controllable. The fault here is not Clausewitz’s, but the American military’s for misreading and oversimplifying him.

Perhaps another “Carl” might lend a hand when it comes to helping Americans understand what war is really all about. I’m referring to Karl Marx, who admired Clausewitz, notably for his idea that combat is to war what a cash payment is to commerce. However seldom combat (or such payments) may happen, they are the culmination and so the ultimate arbiters of the process.

War, in other words, is settled by killing, a bloody transaction that echoes the exploitative exchanges of capitalism. Marx found this idea to be both suggestive and pregnant with meaning. So should we all.

Following Marx, Americans ought to think about war not just as an extreme exercise of politics, but also as a continuation of exploitative commerce by other means. Combat as commerce: there’s more in that than simple alliteration.

In the history of war, such commercial transactions took many forms, whether as territory conquered, spoils carted away, raw materials appropriated, or market share gained. Consider American wars. The War of 1812 is sometimes portrayed as a minor dust-up with Britain, involving the temporary occupation and burning of our capital, but it really was about crushing Indians on the frontier and grabbing their land. The Mexican-American War was another land grab, this time for the benefit of slaveholders. The Spanish-American War was a land grab for those seeking an American empire overseas, while World War I was for making the world “safe for democracy” — and for American business interests globally.

Even World War II, a war necessary to stop Hitler and Imperial Japan, witnessed the emergence of the U.S. as the arsenal of democracy, the world’s dominant power, and the new imperial stand-in for a bankrupt British Empire.

Korea? Vietnam? Lots of profit for the military-industrial complex and plenty of power for the Pentagon establishment. Iraq, the Middle East, current adventures in Africa? Oil, markets, natural resources, global dominance.

In societal calamities like war, there will always be winners and losers. But the clearest winners are often companies like Boeing and Dow Chemical, which provided B-52 bombers and Agent Orange, respectively, to the U.S. military in Vietnam. Such “arms merchants” — an older, more honest term than today’s “defense contractor” — don’t have to pursue the hard sell, not when war and preparations for it have become so permanently, inseparably intertwined with the American economy, foreign policy, and our nation’s identity as a rugged land of “warriors” and “heroes” (more on that in a moment).

War as Disaster Capitalism

Consider one more definition of war: not as politics or even as commerce, but as societal catastrophe. Thinking this way, we can apply Naomi Klein’s concepts of the “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” to it. When such disasters occur, there are always those who seek to turn a profit.

Most Americans are, however, discouraged from thinking about war this way thanks to the power of what we call “patriotism” or, at an extreme, “superpatriotism” when it applies to us, and the significantly more negative “nationalism” or “ultra-nationalism” when it appears in other countries. During wars, we’re told to “support our troops,” to wave the flag, to put country first, to respect the patriotic ideal of selfless service and redemptive sacrifice (even if all but 1% of us are never expected to serve or sacrifice).

We’re discouraged from reflecting on the uncomfortable fact that, as “our” troops sacrifice and suffer, others in society are profiting big time. Such thoughts are considered unseemly and unpatriotic. Pay no attention to the war profiteers, who pass as perfectly respectable companies. After all, any price is worth paying (or profits worth offering up) to contain the enemy — not so long ago, the red menace, but in the twenty-first century, the murderous terrorist.

Forever war is forever profitable. Think of the Lockheed Martins of the world. In their commerce with the Pentagon, as well as the militaries of other nations, they ultimately seek cash payment for their weapons and a world in which such weaponry will be eternally needed. In the pursuit of security or victory, political leaders willingly pay their price.

Call it a Clausewitzian/Marxian feedback loop or the dialectic of Carl and Karl. It also represents the eternal marriage of combat and commerce. If it doesn’t catch all of what war is about, it should at least remind us of the degree to which war as disaster capitalism is driven by profit and power.

For a synthesis, we need only turn from Carl or Karl to Cal — President Calvin Coolidge, that is. “The business of America is business,” he declared in the Roaring Twenties. Almost a century later, the business of America is war, even if today’s presidents are too polite to mention that the business is booming.

America’s War Heroes as Commodities

Many young people today are, in fact, looking for a release from consumerism. In seeking new identities, quite a few turn to the military. And it provides. Recruits are hailed as warriors and warfighters, as heroes, and not just within the military either, but by society at large.

Yet in joining the military and being celebrated for that act, our troops paradoxically become yet another commodity, another consumable of the state. Indeed, they become consumed by war and its violence. Their compensation? To be packaged and marketed as the heroes of our militarized moment. Steven Gardiner, a cultural anthropologist and U.S. Army veteran, has written eloquently about what he calls the “heroic masochism” of militarized settings and their allure for America’s youth. Put succinctly, in seeking to escape a consumerism that has lost its meaning and find a release from dead-end jobs, many volunteers are transformed into celebrants of violence, seekers and givers of pain, a harsh reality Americans ignore as long as that violence is acted out overseas against our enemies and local populations.

Such “heroic” identities, tied so closely to violence in war, often prove poorly suited to peacetime settings. Frustration and demoralization devolve into domestic violence and suicide. In an American society with ever fewer meaningful peacetime jobs, exhibiting greater and greater polarization of wealth and opportunity, the decisions of some veterans to turn to or return to mind-numbing drugs of various sorts and soul-stirring violence is tragically predictable. That it stems from their exploitative commodification as so many heroic inflictors of violence in our name is a reality most Americans are content to forget.

You May Not Be Interested in War, but War Is Interested in You

As Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky pithily observed, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” If war is combat and commerce, calamity and commodity, it cannot be left to our political leaders alone — and certainly not to our generals. When it comes to war, however far from it we may seem to be, we’re all in our own ways customers and consumers. Some pay a high price. Many pay a little. A few gain a lot. Keep an eye on those few and you’ll end up with a keener appreciation of what war is actually all about.

No wonder our leaders tell us not to worry our little heads about our wars — just support those troops, go shopping, and keep waving that flag. If patriotism is famously the last refuge of the scoundrel, it’s also the first recourse of those seeking to mobilize customers for the latest bloodletting exercise in combat as commerce.

Just remember: in the grand bargain that is war, it’s their product and their profit. And that’s no bargain for America, or for that matter for the world.

William Astore, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He edits the blog contraryperspective.com and may be reached at wjastore@gmail.com

Copyright 2013 William J. Astore