50 Reasons We Should Fear the Worst from Fukushima

by Harvey Wasserman, EcoWatch, 2/2/14

Fukushima’s missing melted cores and radioactive gushers continue to fester in secret.

Japan’s harsh dictatorial censorship has been matched by a global corporate media blackout aimed—successfully—at keeping Fukushima out of the public eye.

But that doesn’t keep the actual radiation out of our ecosystem, our markets … or our bodies.

Speculation on the ultimate impact ranges from the utterly harmless to the intensely apocalyptic .

But the basic reality is simple: for seven decades, government Bomb factories and privately-owned reactors have spewed massive quantities of unmonitored radiation into the biosphere.

The impacts of these emissions on human and ecological health are unknown primarily because the nuclear industry has resolutely refused to study them.

Indeed, the official presumption has always been that showing proof of damage from nuclear Bomb tests and commercial reactors falls to the victims, not the perpetrators.

And that in any case, the industry will be held virtually harmless.

This “see no evil, pay no damages” mindset dates from the Bombing of Hiroshima to Fukushima to the disaster coming next … which could be happening as you read this.

Here are 50 preliminary reasons why this radioactive legacy demands we prepare for the worst for our oceans, our planet, our economy … ourselves.

1. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), the U.S. military initially denied that there was any radioactive fallout, or that it could do any damage. Despite an absence of meaningful data, the victims (including a group of U.S. prisoners of war) and their supporters were officially “discredited” and scorned.

2. Likewise, when Nobel-winners Linus Pauling and Andre Sakharov correctly warned of a massive global death toll from atmospheric Bomb testing, they were dismissed with official contempt … until they won in the court of public opinion.

3. During and after the Bomb Tests (1946-63), downwinders in the South Pacific and American west, along with thousands of U.S. “atomic vets,” were told their radiation-induced health problems were imaginary … until they proved utterly irrefutable.

4. When British Dr. Alice Stewart proved (1956) that even tiny x-ray doses to pregnant mothers could double childhood leukemia rates, she was assaulted with 30 years of heavily funded abuse from the nuclear and medical establishments.

5. But Stewart’s findings proved tragically accurate, and helped set in stone the medical health physics consensus that there is no “safe dose” of radiation … and that pregnant women should not be x-rayed, or exposed to equivalent radiation.

6. More than 400 commercial power reactors have been injected into our ecosphere with no meaningful data to measure their potential health and environmental impacts, and no systematic global data base has been established or maintained. …

continue reading and follow links at EcoWatch

97% of cuts to food stamps target just 15 blue states

from Democracy For America, 2/2/14

Last Wednesday, the U.S. House voted to cut a horrifying $8.7 billion from food stamps. Next week, the Senate will face the same bill.

Almost all of the food stamp cuts come from 16 states and the District of Columbia — including Pennsylvania. The rest of the nation is left virtually untouched.

Please join DFA and our friends at DailyKos in asking your U.S. Senators to just say “no” to food stamp cuts.

But wait, that’s not all — 15 of these 16 states voted for President Obama twice, and 28 of their 32 senators are Democrats. In other words, these cuts are targeted overwhelmingly at poor folks in blue states.

This latest version of the Farm Bill cuts food stamps and overwhelmingly impacts low-income folks in blue states. Sign and send DFA and DailyKos’ petition to your two Senators, telling them to vote “no” on the Farm Bill.

We’ve been fighting an uphill battle for months and we are now in the last moments. As frustrating as it is, keeping on the pressure is the best way to discourage Senators from making a costly mistake.

Thank you for all you do.

Monique Teal
Campaign Manager, Democracy for America

Can you chip in $3 to help DFA keep fighting on food stamps?

GOP Lawmaker: Give $250M Subsidy for Rich Horse Owners to Rich School Districts Instead

by Jon Geeting, Keystone Politics, January 31, 2014

One of the more inequitable and depressing things that’s been happening during the Corbett administration is that we’ve been giving $250 million a year in subsidies to rich horse owners while gutting our schools.

The Race Horse Development Fund (RHDF) takes $250 million of casino slot revenues and allocates it toward “enhancing” prize money at horse race tracks because ??!?1??

When Tom Corbett last proposed to decrease the subsidy we’re lavishing on rich horse owners by a couple million, special horse interests shrieked that this was like “rape,” because obviously.

Horrible Democrat Lisa Boscola agreed that horse pork has a stronger claim than school children on this $250 million.

The good news is that this pot of money is increasingly seen as in play, because who honestly has that many race horse owners in their district? Republican Rep. Todd Stephens has introduced a bill that would take the $250 million and spend it on education instead.

Sounds good, right?

But then! it turns out that Rep. Stephens only wants to spend the money on certain school districts. Rich districts!

Rep. Todd Stephens (R-North Wales) today proposed gutting the state’s Race Horse Development Fund in favor of increasing state funding to school districts that receive less than 35 percent of their funding from the Commonwealth.

Who receives less than 35% of their funding from the Commonwealth?

For instance, in two of the more affluent districts, Montgomery County’s Lower Merion and Springfield, state funding per student amounts to roughly 10 percent, according to 2011-2012 state figures.

In districts with less affluent households and smaller tax bases, state spending is much higher per student. The highest percent of state spending per student is in the Chester-Upland district, where roughly 78 percent comes from state coffers. In Philadelphia, it is nearly 49 percent….

continue reading at Keystone Politics

Harry Reid rips the Koch brothers for trying to “buy the country”

[for a list of all Progressivenetwork’s posts on the Koch Brothers, click here]

by Elias Isquith, Salon, 1/30/14

The Senate majority leader calls out the libertarian billionaires for their political dealings

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid got into it on Thursday with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — but it was the Koch brothers who ended up receiving most of the Nevada Democrat’s ire.

It all started with McConnell complaining about the Obama administration’s new attempt to better regulate nonprofit groups who list themselves as devoted to “social welfare” rather than partisan politics. Within politics, these groups are usually referred to as 501(c)(4) nonprofits. The administration — and many outside observers — worry that too many 501(c)(4)s are making a farce of their social welfare designation by effectively advocating for certain politicians or political parties.

Mitch McConnell disagrees. “Democrats think 2014 is shaping up to be a tough year for them politically. So instead of trying to persuade the public that they’ve got the best answers to the problems we face, they try to shut everybody else out of the political process, they try to shut them up,” McConnell said. He went on to accuse the president of wanting “to use the IRS to drive conservatives right off the playing field.”

Reid wasn’t having it, and pointed to the conservative billionaire Koch brothers — who directly and indirectly fund many of these organizations — as a prime example of how the rules are being disregarded or abused by outside political actors. “Because of a United States Supreme Court decisions called Citizens United, there’s been some really untoward stuff going on in the political world,” Reid said. “We have two brothers who are actually trying to buy the country.”…

continue reading at Salon