Capitalism, Fukushima, Creative Reconstruction & The History Of Olympics by Labor Video Project Monday May 27th, 2019
Professor George Wright discusses the history of the Olympics and how privatization and control by the corporations of the world have led to in allowing the Olympics going to Japan and the contaminated Fukushima. The three broken nuclear reactors still have melted nuclear rods which must be cooled with water. He discusses the systemic corruption of the Olympic Committee and how it is now ignored the safety of the athletes and the public.
Capitalism, Fukushima, Creative Reconstruction & The History Of Olympics with Professor George Wright
The Japanese Prime Minister Abe with the support of the Internatonal Olympics Committee is planning to have the 2020 Olympics in Japan with the baseball games and para-olympics taking place in Fukushima.Professor George Wright looks at the history of Olympics and how the commericalization for profit of the Olympics has led to the Olympics Committee approving the having part of the 2020 Olympics in the still contaminated Fukushima. He talks about “created reconstrucation” and how Olympics are driven by political and corporate agendas.
Although Prime Minister Abe has told the Olympic Committee that Fukushima has been “decontaminated” the melted nuclear rods have still not been removed from the broken reactors and there is over one million tons of radioactive water in tanks surrounding the nuclear reactors.
Additionally there are tens of thousand of bags full of radioactive material in bags spread throughout the Fukushima region.
This forum was presented by No Nukes Action on Sunday May 26th, 2019. ……..
Thomas Bach, the head of the Olympics knows about the contamination in Fukushima and the lies by Japan PM Abe about the “decontamination” of Fukushima but continues to move forward with the games in Fukshima. The television companies and other sponsors control the agenda of the Olympic committee.
by Labor Video Project Monday May 27th, 2019 6:30 PM
The Japanese. government is spending tens of millions of dollars to refurbish the Azuma stadium for the Olympic games in Fukushima to whitewash the dangers of the contaminated region. The Olympic Committee is helping to propagandize the people of the world that Fukushima is “safe”. https://www.indybay.org/comment.php?top_id=18823644
Assange won’t face charges over role in devastating CIA leak The decision surprised national security experts and some former officials, given prosecutors’ recent decision to go after the WikiLeaks founder on Espionage Act charges.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will not face charges for publishing Vault 7, a series of documents detailing the CIA’s arsenal of digital code used to hack devices Politico, By NATASHA BERTRAND, 6/2/19
The U.S. Justice Department has decided not to charge Julian Assange for his role in exposing some of the CIA’s most secret spying tools, according to a U.S. official and two other people familiar with the case.
It’s a move that has surprised national security experts and some former officials, given prosecutors’ recent decision to aggressively go after the WikiLeaks founder on more controversial Espionage Act charges that some legal experts said would not hold up in court. ……
Prosecutors were stymied by several factors. First, the government is facing a ticking clock in its efforts to extradite Assange to the United States from the United Kingdom, where he is being held. Extradition laws require the U.S. to bring any additional charges against Assange within 60 days of the first indictment, which prosecutors filed in March, accusing Assange of helping former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning hack into military computers.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will not face charges for publishing Vault 7, a series of documents detailing the CIA’s arsenal of digital code used to hack devices | Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. Justice Department has decided not to charge Julian Assange for his role in exposing some of the CIA’s most secret spying tools, according to a U.S. official and two other people familiar with the case.
It’s a move that has surprised national security experts and some former officials, given prosecutors’ recent decision to aggressively go after the WikiLeaks founder on more controversial Espionage Act charges that some legal experts said would not hold up in court. The decision also means that Assange will not face punishment for publishing one of the CIA’s most potent arsenals of digital code used to hack devices, dubbed Vault 7. The leak — one of the most devastating in CIA history — not only essentially rendered those tools useless for the CIA, it gave foreign spies and rogue hackers access to them.
Prosecutors were stymied by several factors.
First, the government is facing a ticking clock in its efforts to extradite Assange to the United States from the United Kingdom, where he is being held. Extradition laws require the U.S. to bring any additional charges against Assange within 60 days of the first indictment, which prosecutors filed in March, accusing Assange of helping former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning hack into military computers.
Second, prosecutors were worried about the sensitivity of the Vault 7 materials, according to an official familiar with the deliberations over whether to charge Assange. Broaching such a classified subject in court risks exposing even more CIA secrets, legal experts said. The CIA has never officially confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents, even though analysts widely believe them to be authentic……
Together Against Sizewell C chairman, Pete Wilkinson, claims that EDF CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy makes some schoolboy errors in his fatuous defence of nuclear power in his IEA February 25th speech, this having been recently reported by World Nuclear News, 20 May 2019. Pete Wilkinson says “M. Lévy is careful to use the word ‘direct’ when claiming that nuclear power produces electricity without emissions; by this, he presumably means that the only part of the nuclear fuel cycle that can even come close to being ‘low carbon’ is that which ‘burns’ uranium in the reactor. Of course, he knows, as do we all, that across the entire fuel cycle, nuclear requires an acceptance of a carbon footprint from uranium mining, milling, enrichment, fuel production, transport, nuclear plant construction, storage and the still-unknown CO2 burdens created by final spent fuel and waste management conundrums. To claim otherwise is disingenuous, especially from someone in such a position of responsibility.
It is true that the fight against climate change is challenging, but to conclude that nuclear power is essential to winning that fight is wrong and designed to defend a technology which is antiquated, costly, polluting and presents us with a wealth of unresolved health issues related to childhood leukaemia. Sixty studies, including the seminal German government-sponsored KiKK Report indicate elevated rates of leukaemia and other cancers as a result of exposure to ionising radiation.
The Oxford Research Group produced a report some years ago which clearly demonstrated that, given the global nature of the problem of climate change, it would require the building of at least 3000 nuclear plants to have a noticeable impact on the problem – that’s one new plant a week for 60 years. Impossible, yes, but wholly undesirable as well since the nuclear waste legacy that scale of programme would create is unthinkable: we can’t even deal with the 500,000 cubic metres of legacy waste in the UK after 60 years of merrily creating it without a thought about how to manage it safely. Even after ten years of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the UK is still no closer to a universally safe and secure means of dealing with the legacy waste, let alone the hotter and more radioactive waste which M. Levy’s reactors will leave us over the next few decades in return for huge amounts of UK tax payers’ cash should the plant at Hinkley ever be finished and should Sizewell become more than an EdF aspiration.
A further reason why nuclear power cannot hope to have more than a minor role to play in the fight against the climate emergency, is the fact that the plants take so long to build. The ‘nuclear renaissance’ in the UK was mooted on the back of energy security and low carbon. The lights in the UK were, at the time of Blair’s announcement in 2005, predicted to go out in 2017. It is now 2019, the lights didn’t go out and no new nuclear is contributing electricity to the national grid in the UK and is unlikely to be doing so for at least another six or seven years – probably longer, given the historic over-runs of time and budget which accompany nuclear plant. Nuclear is an option for the future, not an imperative: that much has been shown time and again with analyses from highly reputable and responsible green and academic groups. Nuclear just can’t contribute fast enough and even if and when it does, its contribution will be only marginal at best, negative at worst.
By definition, renewables are potentially endless. They rely on the Sun, the wind, the tides and ambient energy. Moreover, the source of the energy arrives free-of-charge, without mining for rare, unstable and potentially lethal metals or digging for fossil fuels to burn, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere. Combined with efficiency measures, decentralised electricity generation, smart grids and conservation measures which have already seen electricity demand fall in the UK by some 16% in the last decade, we can meet all our climate change, cost and demand targets without nuclear. This has been demonstrated time and time again: nuclear is an option, not an imperative, and it is an option we should refuse.
Quite apart from the fact that EdF’s flagship EPR Flamanville plant is facing a further two year delay as a result of ASN’s likely demands that reactor core welds are repaired, it is appropriate to remind M. Lévy that EdF is hugely in debt, that its board of Directors are not united in their view of the company’s new build programme and that the victim communities around the proposed sites for new build are fearful of the wholesale disruption to their lives, the environment and the tranquility they currently enjoy in these largely remote and isolated sites”.
For those who don’t know much about the disaster, the series is an eye-opener. For those who do know what happened, the series is a near-perfect recreation of the events that took place in Soviet Ukraine on the morning of April 27, 1986.
Well, our feeling was if we started pushing the envelope on those things then we would diminish the impact of all the things that we were accurate about, so we stayed as accurate as we could.”
Location scouting for Soviet-era environment
The producers recreated Pripyat, the closest town to the disaster, in Fabijoniškės, a residential district of Vilnius, Lithuania. It retains an authentic Soviet atmosphere, and was used in the scenes where Pripyat is evacuated.
A twin to Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4 was found at the decommissioned Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant at Visaginas, Lithuania. It was used for both exterior and interior shots. Ignalina is also a RBMK nuclear power reactor, the same type as the doomed Chernobyl Reactor No. 4. Several final scenes of the series were shot in Ukraine.
Public Response
The public’s response to Chernobyl has been overwhelmingly positive. The series has a 96 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The critical consensus on the site says, “Chernobyl rivets with a creeping dread that never dissipates, dramatizing a national tragedy with sterling craft and an intelligent dissection of institutional rot.”
In his review in The Washington Post, Hank Stuever described the series as an “effective, no-nonsense and highly researched dramatization …” and said that it is “committed to a disciplined, truthful and scientific account.”
On the site Metacritic, based on 26 critics, Chernobyl has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, indicating “universal acclaim”.
In her article in The Atlantic Sophie Gilbert says of the series, “Whether you apply its message to climate change, the ‘alternative facts’ administration of the current moment, or anti-vaccine screeds on Facebook, Mazin’s moral stands: The truth will eventually come out.”
The Democratic takeover of the House refocused the climate conversation in Washington. Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) along with Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) introduced a nonbinding resolution calling for a Green New Deal, which aims to achieve a “fair and just transition” to net-zero emissions and ties climate action to other progressive goals such as universal health care and a jobs guarantee. The resolution, which became the subject of GOP mockery, has drawn criticism from labor leaders and some Democratic presidential hopefuls.
Climate change has emerged as a key issue in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Candidates frequently discuss climate change on the campaign trail and often face questions from the audience on how they will address the issue.
Where the candidates stand
Here’s where 2020 candidates stand on issues related to climate change, based on candidate statements, voting records and answers to a questionnaire we sent every campaign.
Highlight a candidate
BACKGROUNDPresident Trump intends to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, under which the United States had pledged by 2025 to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 26 percent of its 2005 levels. This will leave the United States the only country to reject the agreement. As the second-largest global emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States would need to do considerably more than President Obama promised in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, experts say……..
Do you support building more nuclear power plants?
YES, EXPAND NUCLEAR POWER – these answered:
Bennet. Booker. Delaney, Hickenlooper, Moulton, Ryan. Yang
NO NEW PLANTS AT THIS TIME – these answered:
Bullock, Buttigieg, Castro, de Blasio, Inslee. Swalwell
NO AND LET’SPHASE OUT NUCLEAR POWER – these answered:
Tokyo 2020 reveals Olympic Torch route will begin in Fukushima, Inside the Games,By Matthew Smith, 1 June 2019
The Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee has revealed the Olympic Torch Relay route, which will take in many of Japan’s most historic and famous sites – and also areas touched by tragedy.
The Flame will be taken all over Japan inside 121 days, culminating in the Olympic Games next summer.
It will begin the final leg of its journey on March 26, 2020 from the J-Village National Training Centre in Fukushima, the training facility of the Japan football team.
The Flame will travel to all 47 prefectures of Japan, with the Organising Committee claiming around 98 per cent of Japan’s population live within one hour’s travel of the proposed route.
The route will take in World Heritage Sites such as Mount Fuji and Itsukushima Shrine, but will also visit areas affected by recent disasters.
Fukushima has been chosen as a start point after the Tohoku region was struck by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, which also caused a nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
As well as revealing the route, Tokyo 2020 also unveiled the Torchbearer uniforms and how members of the public could apply to take part in the Relay.
The uniform features the Relay emblem on the front and the Olympic symbol on the back.
The most notable design feature is a diagonal red stripe, echoing the sash used in place of batons in Ekiden, Japan’s historic long-distance relays…….
“In Japan, these Games are being referred to as ‘the Recovery Games’ and so the Olympic Flame will start its journey from an area affected by recent natural disasters……
June 2, 2019 Former Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul says Julian Assange could die in prison and blames the apparent deterioration in the WikiLeaks founder’s heath on how he is being treated by the US and UK governments.
Speaking on ‘Ron Paul Liberty Report, the 83-year-old accuses the US government of pursuing Assange and says they would like to either challenge him with a death penalty or a life time in prison ‘for being a journalist.’
The Libertarian calls Assange’s a ‘tragic story’ and describes his health as ‘very very bad,’ commenting that friends of the whistleblower are worried that his health may not hold up.
Assange, 47, has been moved to the hospital wing at Belmarsh prison and has been found too unwell to appear by video-link as scheduled at Westminster magistrates’ court.
His lawyers reported it was not possible to have a normal conversation with him.
U.S. authorities accuse Assange of violating the Espionage Act over the publication of secret documents.
Sweden wants to question him about sexual misconduct allegations.
Paul also compares Assange’s plight to the case of Otto Frederick Warmbier, an American college student imprisoned in North Korea in 2016.
In June 2017, Warmbier was released by North Korea in a vegetative state and died soon afterward.
Paul goes on to ask what the ramifications would be if Assange is much sicker than is being revealed and dies in prison as the result of how his case has been handled by Washington and London.
‘If he had a terminal disease or something happens to him, good, bad, or whatever and he dies in the prison, how would we look a lot different to the North Koreans on the surface?’ Paul questions.
Paul’s claims come as an independent expert for the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council who visited Assange in prison says he ‘showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture.’
Nils Melzer, the special rapporteur on torture, visited Assange on May 9 with two medical experts in examining potential victims of torture and ill-treatment, as reported by The U.N. human rights office on Friday.
The UK, along with the US and Ecuador, has engaged in a ‘relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation against Mr Assange’, Melzer said.
He added it was ‘obvious’ that Assange’s health had been affected by ‘the extremely hostile and arbitrary environment’ he faced for years.
In ‘Ron Paul Liberty Report,’ Paul goes on to slam the American media and journalists for their lack of reporting on Assange’s health problems, adding that news of his ill health came out via a Swedish newspaper.
Paul adds there is ‘not much good journalism around any more’ and that by not doing more reporting on Assange, journalists ‘don’t want to protect their right to be a journalist.’
Paul defends Assange’s leaking of information saying it is ‘not like he spied for the enemy.’
‘His crime was telling us the truth,’ Paul says. ‘He was telling the truth, he was revealing information … he is a whistleblower in the form of a journalist,’ Paul added.
Assange lived in Ecuador’s Embassy in London in 2012 until he was arrested in April after Ecuadorean officials withdrew his asylum status.
Science historian Kate Brown’s painstakingly researched book Manual for Survival. A Chernobyl Guide to the Future reveals a conscious decision by the then Soviet government to downplay and suppress the true extent of harm caused by the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion. Come and hear her talk about this and more.
What forces can empower survival and the art of living on a damaged planet? Her research has taken her to Europe’s largest wetlands—the Pripyat Marshes at the border of the Ukraine and Belarus—a site of multi-generational experiences of suffering from revolution, wars, genocide, and chemical and nuclear catastrophe.
‘Unlimited reach, no safeguards’: Snowden warns of greatest social control scheme in history https://www.rt.com/news/460854-snowden-surveillance-social-control/2 Jun, 2019 The US government has a tendency to hijack and weaponize revolutionary innovations, Edward Snowden said, noting that the natural human desire to communicate with others is now being exploited on an unprecedented scale.
“Our utopian vision for the future is never guaranteed to be realized,” Snowden told the audience in Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada via live stream from Moscow this week, stressing that the US government “corrupted our knowledge… towards a military purpose.”
They took our nuclear capability and transformed it into the most horrible weapon that the world had ever witnessed. And we’re seeing an atomic moment of computer science… Its reach is unlimited… but its safeguards are not!
The whistleblower, who in 2013 leaked a trove of highly classified information about global spying operations by the National Security Agency, argued that, armed with modern technology and with the help of social media and tech giants, governments are becoming “all-powerful” in their ability to monitor, analyze, and influence behavior.
It’s through the use of new platforms and algorithms that are built on and around these capabilities that they are able to shift our behavior. In some cases, they are able to predict our decisions and also nudge them to different outcomes.
The natural human need for “belonging” is being exploited and users voluntarily consent to surrender virtually all of their data by signing carefully drafted user agreements that no one bothers to read. “Everything has hundreds and hundreds of pages of legal jargon that we’re not qualified to read and assess and yet they are considered binding upon us,” Snowden said.
And now these institutions, which are both commercial and governmental… have structuralized and entrenched it to where it has become now the most effective means of social control in the history of our species.
WATCH Edward Snowden’s full speech: Open Dialogue: Edward Snowden, Live from Russia | Dalhousie University
Youth climate activists set for nationwide rallies ahead of landmark case, Guardian, Lee van der Vooin Oregon, 2 June 19 Young people to hold day of action on Saturday highlighting lawsuit as youth-driven climate movement grows, Students in Austin, Texas, want you to veg out. Kids in Westport, Connecticut will screen a film. And in rural North Carolina, activists will draw on a toxic spill to commemorate the environmental justice movement.
All of these rallies will be part of an international campaign on Saturday to spotlight environmental issues. Their message: I Am Juliana.
The slogan refers to the landmark court case in Oregon in which 21 youths are suing the United States government over climate change.
Named for Kelsey Juliana, a 23-year-old activist and college student, the case was filed in 2015 and is headed back to court on Tuesday. The campaign to raise its profile – dubbed #IAmJuliana or #AllEyesOnJuliana – is the brainchild of Our Children’s Trust, the organization behind the lawsuit, and Future Coalition, the not-for-profit network forged to empower youth after the Parkland shooting.
NFLA 31st May 2019 , NFLA welcomes West Dunbartonshire Council resolutions to support the Treaty
for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to deal with the ‘climate
emergency’ and calls for divestment from fossil fuels & nuclear weapons.
The Week in Energy, Ft.com, 2 June 19, ”………..The IEA this week published a report titled “Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System”, its first on the industry for more than 20 years, because it is so concerned about the wave of nuclear plant closures across the developed world.
………(The IAEA) acknowledges that the outlook is “highly uncertain”. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986, now being vividly recreated in a television drama series from HBO, put a brake on investment in new reactors in western countries for two decades, and then just as there was talk of a “nuclear renaissance” emerging in the 21st century, the Fukushima disaster of 2011 dealt another blow to public confidence. The IEA argues that the most important reason for the collapse of investor appetite for new nuclear plants in Europe and the US, however, has been the industry’s failure to deliver projects on time and on budget. At a time when the costs of renewable energy have been plunging, the cost of nuclear power has been soaring. The estimated cost of the EPR reactor that French utility EDF is building at Flamanville in Normandy, for example, has soared from €3bn to €11bn. François de Rugy, France’s environment minister, said this week that the start date for the reactor was still uncertain. Such stories are the rule rather than the exception for new nuclear plants built in Europe and the US over the past 15 years.
As a result, investing in new nuclear plants is very difficult for the private sector. Of 54 under construction worldwide today, 47 are being built by state-owned companies, and six of the seven in the private sector have price regulation in place to give them some certainty about their revenues. But beyond that, even keeping existing plants running is becoming increasingly difficult …..
The IEA suggests a range of policy measures for supporting nuclear power, including operating lifetime extensions from regulators, electricity market designs that reward nuclear plants for their advantages including high levels of availability, and payments that put nuclear on an even footing with renewable sources as low-carbon power. In practice, the blunt realities of energy politics have meant that moves to help nuclear power have not always played out in the best possible ways for curbing emissions. In the US, New York, Illinois and most recently New Jersey have put measures in place to support their nuclear plants. A similar plan is being debated in Pennsylvania, and although it has come too late for Three Mile Island, it could save the state’s other nuclear plants.
There have been vigorous arguments over all of these initiatives, but the most controversial of all has been the plan now moving through the legislature in Ohio, which links support for nuclear power to help for coal-fired plants and an attack on policies favouring renewables and energy efficiency. The state’s House of Representatives this week approved a bill that would create new payments for Ohio’s two nuclear plants, while cutting support for energy efficiency and scrapping the state’s mandated standard requiring 12.5 per cent of its generation to come from renewable sources by 2027. The legislation now goes to the state’s Senate. The plan has won bipartisan support, but it has been a particularly critical issue for Ohio’s Republicans.
A senior adviser to President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has been urging state lawmakers to back the plan, because of the thousands of jobs that would be lost if the nuclear plants closed. “The message is that if we have these plants shut down we can’t get Trump re-elected,” a source told Politico.
In another example of how the changing energy landscape of the US has shaken up old enmities and alliances, the campaign against the bill has united environmentalists and the oil and gas industry. Neil Waggoner of the Sierra Club, the environmental group, described the legislation as “a farce” and “an absolute embarrassment for Ohio”. The American Petroleum Industry warned that customers would “pay the price” for the bill, and urged the state Senate to “protect Ohio taxpayers and reject this legislative bailout”.
Prosecutors recently expanded a criminal case against Julian Assange to include accusations that he violated the Espionage Act by soliciting, obtaining, and publishing classified documents leaked in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, which could establish a precedent that such common journalistic activities (a separate question from whether Assange counts as a “journalist”) can be treated as a crime in America.
The Question
Are these charges constitutional? Would your administration continue the Espionage Act part of the case against Assange?……..
Whatever one’s opinions of Julian Assange, these charges under the Espionage Act set a precedent that could be used to target journalists. We should not be using this case as a pretext to wage war on the First Amendment and go after the free press who hold the powerful accountable everyday. morehttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/politics/press-freedoms-executive-power.html
