Badlands Journal

3-17-11
Politicsdaily.com
Obama Says U.S. Safe From Japan Radiation, Orders Review of U.S. Nuclear Plants
http://www.politicsdaily.com/
President Obama reassured Americans Thursday that radiation from Japan's damaged nuclear plants poses no threat to this country, but added that he has ordered safety reviews of U.S. nuclear facilities.

"We do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the United States, whether it's the West Coast, Hawaii, Alaska, or U.S. territories in the Pacific," Obama said in an address from the Rose Garden. "That is the judgment of our Nuclear Regulatory Commission and many other experts."

Americans do not need to take any precautions against radiation contamination "beyond staying informed" of what's happening in Japan...

*****

"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." -- Claud Cockburn

Here are tfhree articles that might have escaped your attention about the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear reactor meltdown. The first two deal with the weakness of the Japanese government and the flak issuing from the utility that owns the reactors, which is beginning to enrage the domestic and international public. They are loading down the media with information and data, presented in incomprehensible forms. But they do not answer the questions vital to the public.

Last, the view of the tragedy from Hiroshima, where several anti-nuclear activists were interviewed. One person interviewed was the incomparable reporter from The Chugoku Shimbun, Akira Toshiro, who has specialized in stories on nuclear power for 30 years. Tashiro's book, Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium, asked the question: what is the cost of sheathing bombs with depleted uranium, the cost to land, water, civilians and soldiers alike? His investigations and interviews took place in the US, the UK, Iraq and Yugoslavia.

Badlands Journal editorial board

3-16-11
The New York Times 
Flaws in Japan’s leadership deepen sense of crisis
No strong political class has emerged to take the place of bureaucrats and corporations
By KEN BELSON and NORIMITSU ONISHI
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42114871/ns/world_news-asiapacific/

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is published by AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.  This essay is excerpted from the forthcoming book GreenScare: the New War on Environmentalism by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.

2-18/19-2011
Counterpunch.com
A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
http://www.counterpunch.com/stclair02182011.html

Getting Gored

From the beginning, Al Gore was fully in synch with the Clinton two-step on the environment. The first environmental promise Al Gore made in the 1992 campaign, he soon broke. It involved the WTI hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, built on a floodplain near the Ohio River. The plant, one of the largest of its kind in the world, was scheduled to burn 70,000 tons of hazardous waste a year in a spot only 350 feet from the nearest house. A few hundred yards away is East Elementary School, which sits on a ridge nearly eye-level with the top of the smokestack.

We found this editorial was more in the nature of fore-fantasy than forethought.

"If" rather than "when the economy and the housing market finally turn around," might be a firmer economic argument on which the base what follows. The finance, insurance and real estate special interests who control corporate media like McClatchy certainly weren't saying "when the speculative housing bubble bursts" a few years ago. In fact, they publicly doubted "if" the speculative bubble would ever burst.

Tfhe rest of the article deals with two Stanislaus County ordinances, both approved by voters, concerning "saving farmland."

The successful initiative that required a 1:1 mitigation for construction of prime farmland (the developer would have to provide an acre in perpetual conservation easement for every acre of farmland it develops) was upheld in state appellate court last week.
This is the latest version of the old propaganda line that developers create open space. If it had been passed in 1998 instead of 2008 it would have been something; instead it's just hypocrisy.

There is a similar flaw in the "save farmland" measure: the public would vote only on residential developments built on unincorporated, i.e. land under the land-use jurisdiction of Stanislaus County.

You can drive a locomotive through both these laws because they don't cover cities. When cities annex unincorporated (county) land, the laws no longer apply.

Why did this happen? Why did even the near-collapse of the financial system, and its desperate rescue by two reluctant administrations, fail to give the government any real

leverage over the major banks?

By March 2009, the Wall Street banks were not just any interest group. Over the past thirty years, they had become one of the wealthiest industries in the history of the American economy, and one of the most powerful political forces in Washington. Financial sector money poured into the campaign war chests of congressional representatives.

 

December 31, 2010 - January 2, 2011
Counterpunch.com
New Year's Edition
http://www.badlandsjournal.com/node/add/blog

A Concise History of the Rise and Fall of the Enviro Establishment
How Green Became the Color of Money
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

In the early summer of 1995, Jay Hair quietly resigned as head of the National Wildlife Federation. This Napoleonic figure had transformed a once scruffy, apolitical collection of local hunting and gun clubs into the cautious colossus of the environmental movement with more than four million members and an annual budget of nearly $100 million. By the time Hair left, the Federation enjoyed more political clout in Washington than the rest of the environmental groups combined.

Site 1B -- Riverside Motorsports Park (formerly Pacific ComTech Park and Morimoto Industrial Park:)

This property was foreclosed upon and subsequently purchased at public auction on November 12, 2009 by Castle Farms, Inc.---Merced County Board of Supervisors Agenda Item 52, December 14, 2010.

And so ... John Condren, CEO of Riverside Motorsports Park, bought Pacific ComTech Park when Morimoto went bankrupt in 2005, and now Castle Farms, Inc., which plans to develop a large property between the former Air Force base and Merced, has bought the property at public auction.

Castle Farms, Inc., a 2,600 planned community destined for annexation into the City of Merced went through its own approval process with the city about a year before RMP requested that the county Airport Land Use Commission override the noise/safety zone for Castle airport. Without the override, the race track could not be built. Coincidentally, Castle Farms, Inc. stood to gain the ability to develop several hundred acres of its land blocked by the existing Castle airport noise/safety zone.

The story below is about the collision of agriculture and oil industries in Kern County on land that a few decades ago was mostly reserved for oil wells in sagebrush, habitat for roadrunners and coyotes. Irrigation development has brought orchards and row crops to a lot of it now, leading to a confrontation between the two industries.

We imagine that as natural gas drilling increases in the San Joaquin Valley that similar issues will arise between groundwater and the chemicals injected in the gas-drilling process.

Badlands Journal editorial board

...by any other name

10-26-10

 CommonDreams.org
Wall Street Has Already Voted
by Holly Sklar
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/26-6
Before Wall Street drove our economy off a cliff, bullish Citigroup strategists dubbed the United States a "plutonomy." They said, "There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the 'non-rich,' the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie."

Inequality had increased so much since the 1980s, Citi strategists noted in 2005, that the richest 1 percent of households and the bottom 60 percent had "similar slices of the income pie!" Even better, they said, "the top 1 percent of households account for 40 percent of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95 percent of households put together." And the Bush "administration's attempts to change the estate tax code and make

permanent dividend tax cuts, plays directly into the hands of the plutonomy."