Scheer: Obama's Fatal Addiction, A silver lining to the Fukushima disaster?

From: Bill Totten

Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2011 1:27 AM

Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog]

 

A silver lining to the Fukushima disaster?

 

By Philip White

The Japan Times (March 30 2011)

 

The most remarkable thing about the response so far to the “genpatsu

shinsai” (nuclear-earthquake disaster) that has engulfed Japan is that

there are still people who think nuclear power has a future. Should

this be attributed more to the dependence of modern industrialized

societies on massive inputs of energy, or to a collective lack of

imagination?

 

We do not yet know how this unfolding catastrophe will end, but we can

be sure that if most of the radioactivity in the Fukushima Number One

nuclear power plant remains on site, then the true believers will claim

that this is as bad as it gets and that the risk is worth taking. The

environmental damage of localized contamination and releases to sea

will be discounted and long-term health impacts from exposure to low

levels of radiation will be denied. Even those workers who suffer from

acute radiation sickness will not find their way into the most commonly

quoted statistics, unless they die promptly.

 

The truth is that even in the best-case scenario the environmental and

human consequences of this disaster will be enormous. The potential

impact of a worst-case scenario is beyond most people’s comprehension.

To give an indication of the amount of radioactive material involved,

the total capacity of the three reactors that were operating at the

time of the earthquake was double that of the Chernobyl Number Four

reactors that exploded 25 years ago in the Ukraine. To this you have to

add the radioactivity in the spent fuel pools of all six units and of

the shared spent fuel pool.

 

All of this is at risk and, due to the long-term heat-generating

properties of the fuel, the situation will not be stabilized any time

soon. Even if the radioactivity does not travel far, the release of

just a fraction would have incalculable consequences for human beings

and the environment.

 

Besides the true believers, there are also those who regard nuclear

energy as a necessary evil. They don’t particularly like it, but they

see no alternative. But is it true that there is no alternative? For

those who can’t see beyond the current centralized, supply-driven

electrical power systems and who assume an eternally increasing demand

for energy, then perhaps it is difficult to imagine how modern

societies could survive without nuclear power.

 

But if you allow the possibility of decentralized systems that reward

the efficient provision of energy services, rather than the supply of

raw energy, then hitherto unimagined options open up.

 

After last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and now the Fukushima

Number One genpatsu shinsai, people must realize that business as usual

is not an option.

 

To claim that nuclear energy has a future represents a colossal failure

of our collective imagination – a failure to imagine the risks involved

and a failure to imagine how we could do things differently.

 

If future generations are to say that there was a silver lining to the

cloud of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it will be because human

beings now looked beyond their recent history and chose to build a

society that was not subject to catastrophic risks of human making.

 

_____

 

Philip White is the international liaison officer of the Tokyo-based

Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center.

 

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/rss/eo20110330a2.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+japantimes_news+%28The+Japan+Times+Headline+News+-+News+%26+Business%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

 

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_fatal_addiction_20110329/

 

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Obama’s Fatal Addiction

 

By Robert Scheer

Truthdig: March 30, 2011

 

If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama’s “Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.” But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn’t pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year—and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate—has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who “understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy.”

 

What it takes, evidently, is shifting profit and jobs abroad: As of last year only 134,000 of GE’s total workforce of 304,000 was based in the U.S. and according to the New York Times for the past three years 72% of the company’s profit was sheltered abroad. Thanks to changes in the tax law engineered when another avowedly pro-business Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president, U.S. multinational financial companies can avoid taxes on their international scams. And financial scams are what GE excelled in for decades, when GE Capital, its financial unit, which specialized in credit card, consumer loan and housing mortgage debt, accounted for most of GE’s profits.

 

That’s right, GE, along with General Motors with its toxic GMAC financial unit, came to look more like an investment bank than a traditional industrial manufacturing giant that once propelled this economy and ultimately it ran into the same sort of difficulties as the Wall Street hustlers. As The New York Times’ David Kocieniewski, who broke the GE profit story, put it: “Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company’s profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines.”

 

Maximizing corporate profits at the taxpayer’s expense is what top CEOs are good at, and after all it was Immelt who presided over GE when it got so heavily into the subprime mortgage business that it needed a government bailout to avoid bankruptcy. This was before Obama made him a trusted adviser.

 

Back at the end of 2008, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. government had agreed to insure an additional $139 billion in GE Capital’s debt holdings, the second such intervention within a month, adding, “The company’s exposure to the deepest financial crisis since the 1930s has cut its market value by more than half this year.” A Washington Post exposé titled “How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue” documented the power of Immelt’s lobbying operation in Washington. GE was not initially deemed eligible for the debt guarantee program offered to failing banks, “but regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the scenes appeals from GE.” And it worked; as the Post reported, “The government’s actions have been `powerful and helpful’ to the company, GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt acknowledged.” For the next two years, GE would still report enormous profits without paying taxes, adding insult to the injury that financial shenanigans had inflicted on ordinary taxpayers who bailed the company out.

 

On Feb. 6, 2009, Immelt sent a contrite annual letter to GE shareholders, admitting, “Our Company’s reputation was tarnished because we weren’t the ‘safe and reliable’ growth company that is our aspiration.” While conceding his own culpability in GE’s downturn, Immelt predicted a rosy future: “I accept responsibility for this. But, I think the environment presents an opportunity of a lifetime.”

 

Not, obviously, for the 50 million Americans who have either lost their homes or are deeply underwater in a housing market that is still in steep decline thanks to the lending practices of companies like GE Capital. Nope, the good times are in the offing only for corporations that know how to make the U.S. government a partner in their scams. As Immelt stated blatantly: “The global economy, and capitalism, will be `reset’ in several important ways. The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.”

 

That’s the essential blueprint for Obama’s restructuring of the economy, as the president put it in selecting Immelt to replace Paul Volcker as head of his outside team of economic advisers. Volcker had become increasingly critical of the corporate high rollers. Obama, although noting the suffering of ordinary Americans, clearly believes that such populism is now beside the point. As the president put it in announcing Immelt’s appointment on Jan. 20, 2011: “The past two years was about moving our economy back from the brink. Our job now is putting our economy into overdrive.”

 

But overdrive, with CEOs like Immelt shifting the gears, is what brought us so close to the brink. Once again Obama seems fatally addicted to the notion that the heavy hitters who got us into this mess are the very folks to be trusted to get us out of it. What he seems incapable of grasping is that while they are personally very good at avoiding the precipice, the rest of us are hardly passengers in their limos.