http://www.king5.com/news/
SEATTLE -- A Seattle nuclear watchdog group is accusing the federal government of failing to keep the public informed of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
In the days following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the U.S. began monitoring radiation from Japan's leaking nuclear power plants.
Most of the public attention went to the air monitoring which showed little or no radiation coming our way. But things were different on the rain water side.
"The level that was detected on March 24 was 41 times the drinking water standard," said Gerry Pollet from Heart of America Northwest. He reviewed Iodine 131 numbers released by the Environmental Protection Agency last spring.
"Our government said no health levels, no health levels were exceeded.When in fact the rain water in the Northwest is reaching levels 130 times the drinking water standards," said Pollet.
Elevated rain water samples were collected in Portland, Olympia and Boise, which had the highest.
[more at the link!]..............................
The furor over the extension of the debt limit is conveniently ignoring a relevant fact: According to the constitution, it can't happen. The Fourteenth Amendment, enacted immediately after the Civil War, contains this phrase in its Section Four:
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
This means that President Obama is going along with a farce. In case you haven't heard, the tea party doctrinaires and other elements of the Republican party have been threatening the United States with a credit default, trying to blackmail the Presidency into signing draconian austerity measures for the budget without authorizing any reasonable taxation on the very rich. President Obama has been meeting with them, and in the meantime, Moody's has been threatening to downgrade the bond rating of Treasury notes, thereby raising the specter of hyperinflation. But the President does not have to negotiate this issue at all. He is under no obligation to negotiate, and in fact, Section Four of the Fourteeneth Amendment makes it clear that he, and Congress, would be in violation of their duties were they to create conditions that would fail to pay the debts of the United States. Here is that phrase again:
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
This also makes it clear just how treasonous the Republican's Congressional blackmail is. Here we have the unexcusable phenomenon of the elected representatives of the US people, not only failing to look after the welfare of the people as demanded by the preamble to the Constitution, but actively seeking to create an economic disaster.
Is the real intent to actually sink the value of the dollar? It sounds insane until you remember that under the pay-up-front election system of the US, only the billionaire class can expect honest representation, and the billionaires are not dependent on the strength of the US dolar, because they can and will transfer the denomination of their assets in the blink of an eye, to Euros, or Kronor, or gold and silver and platinum, or whatever. On the contrary, the billionaire class can create pleasingly fuedal misery in the US by helping to destroy the status of the US dollar as a world reserve currency. The resulting hyperinflation would allow them to achieve many treasured goals, for example, the beggaring of the US workforce and the political shock-doctrine conditions to ram through privatization of Social Security. The trillions paid in advance into Social Security by US workers over the decades would be a tasty treat for stock market investors.
I'd like to think that President Obama was not a willing participant in this scam, but if he is not, why doesn't he invoke the Fourteenth Amendment, and call the Republicans out, for toadying to the billionaire class and threatening treason? But of course Goldman Sachs, and Tim Geithner, and all billionaires could not ask for a better friend than President Obama, so don't expect a sudden reversal of course. Remember that Obama continued the Bush policy of shoveling trillions --not just the TARP billions, but trillions in total of free and sharply discounted Treasury loans and Federal Reserve deals, to the bankster derivatives gambling class that created, and now maintains, the current credit crisis and its Depression conditions against US workers. And remember that Moody's participated in the scam by rating bundled poisoned mortgage tranches as 'AAA' when they were guaranteed to fail.
Do you see how the current crisis stinks? The payment of the debt--the automatic extension of the debt ceiling, in this case, was never questioned in the more than a dozen times the Bush Administration did it. That's because it's not a real crisis--it's a completely manufactured crisis designed to get you to go along with the destruction the economy and with the shifting of the blame from the billionaire class to the working class.
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http://www.alternet.org/
| The Highest Income Celebrities, CEO and Hedge Fund Managers (2010) | ||
| The Top Ten | Average Yearly Income | Number of years if would take for the average American family to earn as much. |
| Hedge Fund managers | $1,753,000,000 | 35,217 years |
| Movie directors/producers | $126,000,000 | 2,531 |
| Top celebrities from all fields | $119,800,000 | 2,407 |
| Pop musicians | $87,200,000 | 1,752 |
| Non-financial CEOs | $47,100,000 | 946 |
| Athletes | $44,600,000 | 896 |
| Movie stars | $42,600,000 | 856 |
| Authors | $26,900,000 | 402 |
| Median Family Income (2009) | ||
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The super-rich are, more than ever, a parasite class. As a matter of fact, without systematized parasitism, it is impossible to have a billionaire class. Here is an article that helps explain how they extracted the value of your labor, even as your productivity steadily increased, and took it for themselves.
http://dollarsandsense.org/
Nearly $2 Trillion Purloined from U.S. Workers in 2009
BY JAMES M. CYPHER
In 2009, stock owners, bankers, brokers, hedge-fund wizards, highly paid corporate executives, corporations, and mid-ranking managers pocketed—as either income, benefits, or perks such as corporate jets—an estimated $1.91 trillion that 40 years ago would have collectively gone to non-supervisory and production workers in the form of higher wages and benefits. These are the 88 million workers in the private sector who are closely tied to production processes and/or are not responsible for the supervision, planning, or direction of other workers.
From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the benefits of economic growth were broadly shared by those in all income categories: workers received increases in compensation (wages plus benefits) that essentially matched the rise in their productivity. [much more at the link!]