AskWhy! Blogger

So this is Heroic, Is it? Fascist, More Like!

2012-03-21T00:39:00.003+01:00

How can we agree to all this mayhem and still have a clear conscience?

Don't our leaders brag we live in Christian countries? Since when did the Jesus Christ of the gospels approve of killing and injuring people, in these cases people none of us even know. Fascists could hardly be worse. So, whose trying to stop it?

Tax the Rich Every Last Penny Until the Money Banks Stole is Replaced

2012-03-18T22:32:00.004+01:00

Too many people believe the political and media propaganda that we have overspent and we must cut back.

Keep reminding them that the banks overspent, thinking mortgage collateral—houses—would rise in value to cover it—in fact, on the assumption that housing prices would rise indefinitely. They spent money they didn’t have, giving themselves massive bonuses for doing it, then, when the housing market collapsed, they told governments, governments!, they were too big to fail, and told governments, supposedly our governments, they had to give them £$trillions from national treasuries—our money collected as taxes—to replace the money the inept bankers had lost on junk mortgages and junk bonds. What did we have to do with it?

We have already paid the banks—the money they were given was not the government’s money, it was our money, entrusted by us to governments for nation wide social use—yet these governments, supposedly our governments are making us pay again, through enforced austerity measures that have nothing to do with us overspending. Tell them to stuff their austerity measures that hit everyone except the super rich, and to get every penny back from the rich leeches who do nothing and deserve nothing of ours.

How Easily We Forget!

2012-03-17T00:48:00.004+01:00

We read that within two months of the outbreak of World War I, as many as 640,000 young men had volunteered for service in the British army. They gathered outside recruiting offices in crowds so large that mounted police sometimes had to be called in to control them. 90 years on, Tony Blair had to lie to the nation trying to convince it of the moral and legal justification for invading Iraq. A century after “the war to end all wars” the British seemed convinced it should have been, and a million demonstrated against Blair’s fraud. But had popular opinion about warfare really been transformed from a stance of naïve patriotic fervour, to one of widespread aversion or abhorrence?

Cambridge visiting historian, J Winter, thought it was the consequence of a process of cultural evolution:

I do think that one reason Tony Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction was because he couldn’t take the nation with him in support of war. That is a consequence of the contribution artists, poets, filmmakers and others have made to our understanding of the horrors of war. Only a fool would argue that cultural history only moves in one direction at any given time. Nevertheless, there is clearly something that has brought most people to the view that war is simply not a legitimate human activity any more. Time and again culture has shown us that the best defence we have against the ravages of war is the human imagination itself.

There is a certain absence of reality here. It is true that artists and poets were in the forefront of those objecting to the mass murder justified as war, but in the intervening decade, the establishment has pushed warfare down our throats continually, and now there seems to be no substantial body of people willing to object to us acting like fascists in invading other people’s countries and killing poor people, men, women and children in their own homes. The lauding of heavily armed soldiers as heroes is nothing less than obscene, yet the BBC TV does it ad nauseum. With Wootten Bassett no longer the featured town for public displays of sickening one-sided sentimentality, it has now found a new one in the appropriately named, Warminster.

Our utter failure to comprehend the scale of our crimes is that we soak up the propaganda of intervention in the internal affairs of foreign countries, something that for decades after WWII was wrong because it was considered as openly fascist, the very thing that the fascist countries recently defeated, like Nazi Germany and Bushido Japan, had done in their attempts at power grabbing, but following the lead of Tony Blair—a Catholic Saint in the making when the miracle appears—in West Africa and Serbia, then Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of other people’s countries has become acceptable as the norm, and people now write to newspapers demanding it.

Yet, while condemning Assad in Syria for killing allegedly 8000 of his own people, the figures of how many people we are killing in Afghanistan are never published except as journalistic estimates, but they are not slight, and are certainly of the same order. The long term propaganda against Gaddafi ended up in another lie, a so-called no-fly zone, which even the Russians and Chinese were willing to accept, but which turned out to be a full scale air attack which destroyed the country’s main communications and fuelling centers, and killed 50,000 people, according to the government of the anti-Gaddafi victors. Everyone knows that at least a million people were killed in the Bush/Blair WMD attack on Iraq, and the Clinton/Blair sanctions on medicine and supplies that preceded it.

Do we seriously expect that we can treat people like rats and expect them not to bite back? Six British soldiers were killed in one explosion, to be accompanied by the usual BBC and Sky sentimentality, and mock shock.

“Ingrates! We try to help them and this is what we get.”

Just what would these people do if a foreign army landed in this “Sceptred Isle” and started to kill us in our homes, streets and fields? We certainly would not feel gratitude for the brave foreigners dying to “help” us.

Well, get real! Nor do the Afghans, and nor will the Syrians, if we try the same trick there, and nor will the Iranians, who are the real object of this continuous war build up, and propaganda.

Now we hear from politicians advocating the mayhem and their brain-dead supporters—including some parents of the dead, but not others—that we ought not to stop because, if we did, “our lads” will have died in vain. Does anyone seriously buy this? We have to keep sending in battalion after battalion to lose their lives until maybe we might win. It is the gambler’s insane way to recoup his gambling debts. Double up, each time. Eventually he must win. Yes indeed, if he has infinite resources to risk. In this case lives! These dolts are gambling with the lives of our own youth, and are murdering mostly innocent peasants abroad, assuming that we must win before our resources run out—before we run out of young men.

Well, at present we have plenty of young unemployed. They had better be ready to lose their lives as well as their incomes, if the present insane strategy is to work. Major economic crises, like the one between the world wars, ended up in mass brutality. The west is building up to a mass attack on Iran which could be nuclear, and will lead to many deaths and possibly a new World War with Russia and China.

It really is time for us all to begin objecting on a serious scale, to follow the lead of the sensitive souls who wrote moving verse, sang sad songs, made troubling images, and produced films exposing war for what it is—mass cull of human life—in the hopes that it really would end all war. Jay Winter thinks they succeeded, but we are fighting one long continuous war, and have lots of heroes, many dead and more horribly injured.

How can a mass cull of our own children be of value to us? We are not facing any serious external threat like Hitler. Our threat is right here at home. It is our warmongering rulers.

Game Theory Suggests Prejudice Fails When Groups Interact Frequently

2012-03-16T02:47:00.010+01:00

Swiss researchers from ETH Zurich have used game theory to find whether prejudices might sometimes be rational. Dirk Helbing, a professor of sociology, and Thomas Chadefaux investigated the conditions under which intuitive judgements might be sensible, and when they are misleading. Using game theory in which co-operation between people is tested, they created various scenarios and played them fifteen million times.

Prejudices are generally regarded as irrational because they are not based on sufficient social experience, and as unethical because they lead to misjudgements and discrimination disrupting sociality. Yet we tend to be quick to judge others. Might prejudices have been helpful in the course of evolution? be an especially effective decision making method that has evolved

Game theory experiments on people have been done for many years, and have yielded a reliable body of results. The game players simulated on the computer behave in a friendly or unfriendly manner depending on their traits—gender, age, assets, religion or cultural background. Anyone who makes wrong decisions is outsmarted. If the player is friendly and acts in a friendly way to mean one, they get taken for a ride. To avoid it, they have to know the other players and judge what is the best way to act.

The researchers exhaustively tested five different strategies:

ALLD—the players play it safe and are always UNfriendly. However, they do not profit from a friendly counterpart either, and miss many opportunities to be successful.
TFT—“Tit For Tat” begins in being friendly and then requires copying the opposite player. In game theory, TFT is often the most successful play.
P1—just one trait of the opponent decides whether one is friendly or not, a matter of extreme “black and white”—prejudiced—thinking.
P3—three traits are taken into consideration, differentiating the decision.
P5—five traits are taken into consideration, making the decision more differentiated.

In all five scenarios, the researchers varied the number of participants and the duration of the game, and played the simulation a total of fifteen million times. How long the game lasts and how many participants are involved is important.

If the game only lasts for a short time and many take part, the probability that any two players will meet several times is low. So, there is less time to get to know the others. Then the unfriendly ALLD strategy is the most successful. The “black and white” strategy P1 is also effective. But the “tit for tat” strategy has the disadvantage of insufficient time to learn the opposite player’s behaviour first. So, the ALLD and black and white strategy, P1, are triumphant in short games of several players.

Their success declines rapidly when the game lasts longer. The opposite happens for the differentiated P5 and the “tit for tat” strategies. Their success only becomes apparent after a while, but then remains at a high level.

Prejudiced strategies are therefore successful and rational for brief encounters, but, as learning from mistakes is precluded and behavior has no time for adjustment, in longer more complicated encounters they yield to more subtle strategies. Thomas Chadefaux explains:

If there are only five people on an island or the people on an island have known each other for a long time, prejudices are just plain useless.

Those who are prejudiced are soon at a disadvantage, as they learn nothing new and miss many opportunities. But how close are these simulations to reality? What do they say about our everyday life? Dirk Helbing thinks:

Prejudices are—especially because they are formed quickly and easily—often convenient in the everyday world but fail when the situation becomes more complicated.

To show this, the researchers took the real world into consideration. If participants are wrongly assessed and certain traits do not necessarily have anything to with the behaviour, then what happens? Prejudiced players cannot adjust their strategy. They cannot learn and cannot improve. So, they always come up short unless the interaction is brief. Prejudice therefore is only of value to groups of people who interact briefly, as in migrant tribes coming into contact, perhaps. When people meet in a settled cosmopolitan society, subtler, differentiated strategies fare better.

What happens when the participants simply behave randomly? Then, the result deteriorates for all strategies, but, even so, the more players act randomly, the worse prejudiced players perform. Helbing explains:

While it is efficient to react to a single trait in the beginning, you must not stop learning new things in a complex world, otherwise, you miss many good opportunities.

But, developing a differentiated, and, in the long run, more successful, judgement takes time. Helbing says:

The most successful strategy is to start with simple “rules of thumb” and then to refine them.

People who gain a wide range of experiences and are willing to adapt their behavior accordingly perform the best. How you can learn new things in a targeted fashion is central. Applied in real social situations, one should encourage the mixing of different people. Helbing says:

Minorities especially have the problem that they are often wrongly treated because they are not known well enough. So, multiplying contacts with different people avoids blowing your chances of successful interactions with them. Social networks play a key role here.

Zionism for Palestinians: This Is The Meaning of Jewish Fascism

2012-03-15T23:16:00.002+01:00

The UK Far Right is Ready to Arm Against British Moslems

2012-03-15T22:48:00.005+01:00

In a survey of political extremism—From Voting to Violence? Far Right Extremism—Dr Matthew Goodwin, of the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and International Relations, and Professor Jocelyn Evans, of the University of Salford, examined a YouGov survey of 2,152 supporters of the British extreme right wing parties, the British National Party (BNP), the UK Independence Party and the English Defence League (EDL).

To call a spade a spade, these are fascist or crypto fascist parties, so the results are hardly surprising. Large numbers of BNP and UKIP supporters agree that violence between different ethnic, racial and religious groups in Britain is inevitable. The BNP holds that view more strongly. Many went as far as approving armed conflict to ldquo;defend &the British way of life”, evidently a euphemism for killing British Moslems. Dr Goodwin said:

It is current and former BNP members who are the most likely to think that violence may be needed to protect their group, and that inter group violence is largely inevitable.

Large majorities of BNP and UKIP supporters are convinced that Islam poses a serious danger to the West. Dr Goodwin added:

Both groups express high levels of anxiety over Islam and its religious institutions. Both BNP and UKIP supporters would feel bothered by the presence of a mosque in their local community, but to a much higher degree among the BNP supporters. BNP supporters in our sample are overwhelmingly concerned about immigration and Muslims, almost to the exclusion of all other issues. Both BNP and UKIP supporters are considerably dissatisfied with the way democracy is functioning in Britain, and again BNP supporters are the least satisfied.

The authors stress that the report is exploratory rather than a definitive assessment of far right views. Their intention is that this will lead to far bigger research project analysing the beliefs held by far right extremists.

We want to examine whether these views, taken from a relatively small sample, are specific to the far right in Britain. This would include a much larger national population and serve to strengthen the evidence base we have, which is currently weak compared to that on religious extremism.

No doubt a lot of ordinary British people, readers of the dominant right wing press which daily stirs up hatred for immigrants, feel the same way. The answer is not to kill people but to stop hate mongering by millionaire press barons. Certainly, if we are to believe the history of Christianity, that Christians cite proudly, making martyrs of a persecuted monority is only likely to feed religious fanaticism. The Christians boast of their martyrs, just as do the Moslems, but Christians have few martyrs these days, they have millionaire TV evangelists instead, but our insane governments are giving Moslems all the modern day martyrs they need.

Fascists always pick on some unpopular minority to foster hatred of. It is a way of uniting people who otherwise have nothing in common, except their hatred or suspicion of the minority. For Hitler it was the Jews. For the Zionist Jewish state of Israel it is the Palestinians, who are, of course, Moslems. For western fascists the Moslems are the hated and feared minority, but the fear has been engendered by western and Israeli governments grossly abusing Moslem people in their own countries for decades, and indeed centuries.

Despite the justified suspicions of Romans, Christians ended up dominant, forcibly closing all rival religions and introducing a thousand year dark age in Europe. Those who refuse to learn from history are forced to relive it, as George Santayana famously said, though few people ever took any notice, especially the far right and our right wing politicians, whose simple philosophy is “if a battalion is not sufficinet to win, then send in a division, and if that is insufficient then send in an army, and if…”. Greater force is their perpetual answer, but all they do is lose the people, causing massive bloodshed in the meantime. If there are devils in the world, these right wingers are they. They are a distraction from our real enemies, the 1% and their management and banking prostitutes.

Most Moslems by far in the west are poor, they are with us among the 99% and so are our allies. Unite with them!

A Year After Fukushima, Nuclear Madness Persists

2012-03-11T00:31:00.014+01:00

A year on from the Fukishima nuclear meltdown, and the strong warning against the dangers of nuclear fission energy it offers, the United States is moving forward with nuclear power, and the United Kingdom’s coalition government intends to do the same.

In the US, for the first time since 1978, the National Regulatory Commission has approved two new plants. The $14 billion facilities will be built just outside Augusta and operated by the “Southern Company” based in Atlanta, Georgia. They’re scheduled to be operating by 2016 and 2017, and be producing 10 percent of Georgia’s power.

Marilyn Brown, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, said:

It’s smart to continue generating nuclear power in the United States. It is a reliable, cost competitive option that doesn’t contribute to air pollution or contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

Brown helps shape the nation’s energy policies as a board member of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and chair of the company’s Nuclear Oversight Committee. She added that nuclear power plants are expensive to build, compared to natural gas facilities…

But they are clearly worth the investment. A nuclear plant produces no carbon dioxide emissions and four times the power of a typical natural gas facility. Fourteen billion is a big number, but the plants should stay online for 50 to 70 years.

Despite the benefits, critics will always point to the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. These are the nation’s first approved nuclear facilities since Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Experts contend that modern plant designs are much safer than those built previously. Glenn Sjoden, Georgia Tech professor of nuclear and radiological engineering, said:

The new plant designs are passively safe, so there are far fewer issues to worry about, like those that occurred with the older plants at Fukushima with the loss of offsite power. With the new plants, you have a convection cooling loop that uses gravity and runs by itself for days in the event of lost power. There would be no active pumping required… The more modern designs and precautions taken make nuclear the best option to satisfy our energy needs.

Since last year’s Japanese incident, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been reviewing existing US plants to ensure that they can withstand earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters and making retrofit upgrades when necessary.

Critics point to nuclear waste as another challenge with nuclear power. Each of the nation’s 104 plants store the radioactive waste onsite in steel casks protected by concrete and other safety systems. These are safe too, Brown said, because of careful construction and maintenance.

Nuclear waste would be a nonissue if the US reprocessed its spent fuel like other nations such as France, Sjoden said.

Like most nations, they recycle their used fuel, since 95 percent of the fuel can be recycled back into the reactor and used again, making nuclear power the most green energy source out there. Burying the waste, as we do in the United States, is completely wasteful.

The United States generates almost 20 percent of its energy from nuclear plants, the same amount as natural gas. Coal supplies 50 percent. The remainder is generated from hydropower and other natural sources. Brown says:

We must develop more renewables sources, such as wind, solar and biopower. Industry leaders, business and the general public must also become more energy efficient. That is the key to our future.

Unknowns

Yet, contrary to all these sweet siren voices, in a review article in the journal Science, the University of Michigan’s Rodney Ewing, a member of the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, and his two colleagues note that a year after the March 11, 2011, magnitude 9.0 earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, scientists and engineers still do not know how nuclear fuels behave under extreme conditions. They are calling for a national research program to study how nuclear fuels behave under the extreme conditions present during core melt events like those that occurred at Fukushima.

Three of the plant’s six boiling water reactors suffered partial core melt events that involved tremendously high temperatures and powerful radiation fields, as well as interaction between seawater and nuclear fuel. Many tons of seawater were used to cool the overheated reactors and nearby spent fuel storage ponds, and direct discharge of contaminated seawater to the ocean and groundwater occurred for a month. The paper reviews the current understanding of interactions between nuclear fuel and the environment during core melt accidents. Ewing said:

What I realized while watching all of this was how little we actually knew about what happens if you take hot seawater and pour it on nuclear fuel.

Ewing is also a professor in Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering. He is, in short, an expert on nuclear radiation and waste.

No one, as far as I know, had asked the question, “Well, what happens when you do this? Are we doing something really good or really bad?”. That kind of information really wasn’t available, and that expertise, as far as I could see, wasn’t there to be called upon.

He thought that, despite all the uncertainties and unknowns about the short and long term effects, using seawater to cool the Fukushima reactors was probably the right call.

You have a crisis, you have to cool the cores, and you can’t afford to wait around. Using the seawater sounds like the right thing to do.

The use of seawater at Fukushima underscores the need for fundamental knowledge about nuclear fuel that can be applied over a range of unanticipated situations. The research should include studies of the various radioactive materials released from damaged fuel during a core melt incident, as well as a thorough examination of how nuclear fuel interacts with fresh water and seawater. Such studies would help nuclear plant operators respond to unforeseen events, taking appropriate and timely action to minimize impacts on the environment and human health. Ewing pointed out:

An accident will be something that puts you in a situation that you didn’t anticipate, so the research focus should be on the situations you don’t expect to deal with. Right now, that kind of knowledge is fragmentary, at best.

These studies are both difficult and expensive, but are essential to reduce the risk associated with an increasing reliance on nuclear energy.

Fukushima, 11 March 2011

Most of the fuel in the reactors was uranium dioxide. When the tsunami inundated the site about 40 minutes after the earthquake, electrical power was lost, followed by the loss of onsite backup power, resulting in a station blackout and the loss of reactor coolant. A partial core melt event ensued in units 1, 2 and 3. The Japanese operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company or TEPCO, guessed there was a nearly immediate loss of core cooling in unit 1, and almost all of its fuel assemblies melted and accumulated in the bottom of the pressure vessel. Partial melting of the cores in units 2 and 3, damaging a third of the fuel assemblies in each, occurred over the following days.

Reaction of the zirconium alloy fuel cladding with water at high temperatures generated hydrogen gas that accumulated and exploded in four of the reactor units. The release of radioactivity, other than gaseous and volatile fission products, was dominated by the many tons of seawater used to cool the cores and storage pools.

A month on, Tokyo finally upgraded its assessment of the severity of the nuclear emergency to a maximum seven on an international scale—equal with Chernobyl. It was not until May 5 that workers were able to get inside the reactor building for the first time, to see the size of the task ahead of them.

During the nuclear crisis that followed, hundreds of people were exposed to increased levels of radiation. 80,000 or more people were evacuated from the area nearest the Fukushima plant. A year later, all but two of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors remain shut following the precautionary closure of nuclear plants, in a country where nuclear power once supplied nearly 30 percent of the electricity, and all those people remain displaced. Although the Japanese government has declared the plant stable, and it is awarding an initial $13 billion in contracts to begin decontamination and rehabilitation of the more than 8,000 square mile region most exposed to radioactive fallout, the cleanup will be expensive and is expected to take decades, perhaps 40 years.

Under Control? Dissenting Voices!

TEPCO and the Japanese government say things are under control at Fukushima—the tsunami crippled reactors are all in a “state of cold shutdown”—and they are keen to give the impression that there is just cleaning up to do. But that is not how those who spend their days inside the plant see it. One worker in his 50s, a subcontractor who has been working on the plant’s cooling system since September, said:

I can clearly say it’s not safe at all. There are many spots where radiation levels are extremely high,

The man said subcontractors like him were treated like animals. He did not want to be identified for fear of losing the 8,000 yen ($100) daily paycheck he receives.

There have been deaths on site—a 60 year old subcontractor’s fatal heart attack in May was put down to overwork, according to a labour standards inspector—although TEPCO says none related to radiation exposure. In the height of summer with the mercury rising to 38 degrees Celsius (100 Fahrenheit), workers had to go for up to three hours at a time without water because they were unable to take off their masks.

Chie Hosoda, a spokeswoman for the utility, admits conditions at the plant were unacceptable in the past, with the radiation exposure of some workers left unmeasured because of a shortage of dosimeters:

But working conditions have improved now and we are strictly checking the radiation exposure of all workers

TEPCO says at least 167 workers are no longer able to work in nuclear plants because their lifetime radiation exposure has topped 100 millisieverts—the upper limit for workers. Engineers, nuclear experts and ordinary electricians are among the 3,600 people working at the plant every day and TEPCO says it has no problems securing a work force despite the obvious hazards. But one worker told the Tokyo Shimbun:

Those who used to work at the Fukushima nuclear plant for a long time do not go to Daiichi because it’s dangerous. Payment is not good and many of them do not want to lose their jobs by risking exposure to high levels of radiation.

Katsuyasu Iida, secretary general of Tokyo Occupational Safety and Health Centre, a support group for low paid workers, warned the utility may face a labour shortage “if it fails to improve working conditions”. Many with experience in the industry shy away from the plant.

Experts warn that few permanent safety measures are in place at the plant, where the initial rush to contain the accident saw a series of improvised solutions. They say that in another natural disaster—a big earthquake or another large tsunami—the plant could prove very vulnerable. Kazuhiko Kudo, a nuclear reactor expert and professor at Kyushu University said:

The cooling system is not a proper one for normal nuclear reactors and is still a stop-gap measure.

News of setbacks regularly emerge. In early February, TEPCO said radioactive water had spilled out of one of the reactors after a valve in the cooling system jammed, frozen by subzero winter temperatures.

One of the biggest challenges, as Professor Ewing said, is that scientists do not know exactly what they are up against and can only speculate what the inside of the reactors look like—how much of the fuel has melted and how far through containment vessels it has eaten. Kudo said that containment was still a priority and the risk of radiation was still high:

Stabilisation of the plant is a prerequisite for an end to the accident.

Freelance journalist Tomohiko Suzuki, who has written a book based on his experience working undercover at the plant last summer, said it was clearly still “in a state of crisis”. He said:

[TEPCO] was pushing for sloppy construction as it has been in a hurry to achieve cold shutdown as quickly as possible. TEPCO has to maintain this cold shutdown status for years and years to come, but can they make it happen without exposing plant workers to radiation? That’s the question.

The Reaction of the Authorities

The Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (RJIF) established an independent investigation panel to review how the government, TEPCO, and other key organizations responded during the disaster. The foundation’s chairman, Yoichi Funabashi, and staff director of the investigation panel, Kay Kitazawa, explain the reasons behind the lack of disaster preparation. Their findings are based on interviews with nearly 300 people involved in the accident, including then Prime Minister, Naoto Kan.

Kan secretly instructed Shunsuke Kondo, chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), to draw up a “worst case scenario” for the nuclear accident as the crisis deepened—that is, six increasingly drastic scenarios that would play out as various systems at the nuclear plant failed. The RJIF panel obtained a copy of this plan and published it in the Bulletin. The most extreme scenario would have involved evacuation of all residents living within 170 km or more of the Fukushima plant, and, depending on the wind direction, could have meant evacuating the 30 million residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

According to the investigation, the tsunami could and should have been anticipated. Earlier research on the Jogan tsunami of 869 AD showed that high water levels should not have been considered unprecedented along the Japanese coastline where Fukushima is located. TEPCO’s own nuclear energy division understood the risk, but the company dismissed these probabilities as “academic”. Regulatory authorities also encouraged the company to incorporate new findings into its safety plans, but did not make these measures mandatory.

Many human errors were made at Fukushima, illustrating the dangers of building multiple nuclear reactor units close together. Masao Yoshida, the director of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station at the time of the accident, had to cope simultaneously with core meltdowns at three reactors, and exposed fuel pools at four units. The errors were not the fault of one individual, but were systemic. When onsite workers sought answers in the official guide, the Severe Accident Manual, they were not there. And those who misjudged the condition of the emergency cooling system had never actually put the system into service. They had not been trained for such a crisis.

The reports says TEPCO bears the primary responsibility for incompetent handling of the disaster’s aftermath. The organisation failed to make rapid decisions, losing government trust in the process. It highlights government regulators, including the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), and the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC) for their poor response. The Japanese government’s System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) was designed to help governments decide when to evacuate in the event of a radioactive leak. The system was not used, negating the time and money invested in developing the system in the first place. The Japanese government is now considering the creation of a new nuclear safety agency to replace NISA and NSC and be constructed as an external organ of the Environment Ministry.

A public myth of “absolute safety”, nurtured by nuclear power proponents over decades, and being echoed afresh by Marilyn Brown, et al, contributed to the lack of adequate preparation. The public was also ill informed about the meaning of reported radiation levels. The authors conclude:

It’s clear from our investigation of the Fukushima Daiichi accident that even in the technologically advanced country of Japan, the government and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, were astonishingly unprepared, at almost all levels, for the complex nuclear disaster that started with an earthquake and a tsunami. And this grave oversight will affect the Japanese people for decades.

Worries of Concerned Scientists

In a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) entitled, “The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety in 2011: Living on Borrowed Time”, 15 cases of safety equipment problems and security shortcomings at 13 nuclear plants were reported during the last year, a “high” number, although no employees or members of the public were harmed in the incidents. Even so, the lapses were serious enough to warrant special inspections by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which has oversight of the industry and which had itself a mixed record in responding to the problems.

In some instances the NRC did an outstanding job of addressing safety problems before they could lead to a potentially dangerous situation, but there were other times when the federal agency did a less than adequate job of cracking down on nuclear plant owners, who in some cases have flouted agency regulations for decades. Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with 17 years of experience working at nuclear plants, lead author of the report, and the director of UCS’s Nuclear Safety Project, said…

…the agency too often does not live up to its potential, and we are still finding significant problems at nuclear plants that could too easily trigger a serious accident.

Lax NRC oversight has allowed some problems to fester for decades, and found there are 27 reactors with inadequate protection against earthquakes, and 47 nuclear reactors—nearly half of the 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States—still do not comply with fire regulations established by the NRC in 1980 and amended in 2004. Lochbaum said:

That US plant owners could have avoided nearly all the near misses in 2011 if they had addressed known problems in a timely manner suggests that they and the NRC have not learned the lessons of these accidents. Someday their luck may run out.

The vulnerability of nuclear reactors to earthquakes was underscored after problems following a magnitude 5.8 quake that rattled the US East Coast last August, damaging two reactors at the North Anna plant in Virginia, some 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the epicenter of the tremor. Owners of atomic plants too often either close an eye to problems or fail to address them adequately.

Do we want to put our lives, and more importantly, the lives of our children in the hands of smug self-congratulatory back-slappers whose perpetual optimism in the face of warning after warning can be nothing other than insanity? This planet gets enough energy everyday from the sun, and some from the moon, and we can tap it naturally whether directly, or when it has changed into wind power water power, wave power, tidal power, and so on. It is sustainable energy. And we have the technology to overcome problems of the variability of supply.

Fossil fuels are poisoning the air now, and causing global warming. Nuclear energy can never be totally safe, and the waste from it will be radioactive when no one knows where it has been buried. If we do not destroy the human race soon, we will set up a time bomb for its destruction. No one motivated by greed and self aggrandisement will care a toss, but the rest of us do, or should, and we should not be taken in.

The Upper Classes are More Dishonest—Official!

2012-02-28T03:56:00.002+01:00

A series of studies conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto in Canada and reported by the NSF reveal something the well off may not want to hear. Those who are relatively high in social class are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. Lead researcher Paul Piff of UC Berkeley said:

Our studies suggest that more positive attitudes toward greed and the pursuit of self-interest among upper class individuals, in part, drive their tendencies toward increased unethical behavior.

Relative to the lower class, the upper class are more likely to break the law while driving, more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, more likely to take valued goods from others, more likely to lie in a negotiation, more likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize and more likely to endorse unethical behavior at work.

Piff explained:

The relative privilege and security enjoyed by upper class individuals give rise to independence from others and a prioritization of the self and one’s own welfare over the welfare of others—what we call greed. This is likely to cause someone to be more inclined to break the rules in his or her favor, or to perceive themselves as, in a sense, being “above the law”.

They therefore become more likely to committing unethical behavior.

Procedures

Piff and colleagues conducted seven survey, experimental and naturalistic studies to determine which social class is more likely to behave in unethical ways—to engage in behaviors that have important consequences for society such as cheating, deception or breaking the law.

In two naturalistic field studies that examined unethical behavior on the road, researchers were surprised by the differences between upper and lower class people, finding upper class drivers were significantly more likely to pursue their own self-interests and break the law while driving than were lower-class drivers. In these studies, the researchers defined social class by an observable cultural symbol of social class—namely, their car. Drivers of higher-end automobiles were four times more likely to cut off other vehicles before waiting their turn at a busy, four way intersection with stop signs on all sides. In addition, they found upper class drivers were significantly more likely to drive through a crosswalk without yielding to a waiting pedestrian.

In another laboratory study, the upper classes were more likely to cheat to improve their chances of winning a cash prize. Piff and colleagues first measured social class using the MacArthur scale of subjective socioeconomic status, where participants rank themselves on a 10-rung ladder relative to others in society in terms of their wealth, education and the prestige of their jobs. Participants then played a “game of chance” in which a computer presented them “randomly” with one side of a six-sided die on five separate rolls. Participants were told higher rolls would increase their chances of winning a cash prize, and were asked to report their total score at the end of the game. In fact, die rolls were predetermined to sum up to 12. The extent to which participants reported a total exceeding 12 was a direct measure of their cheating. The researchers concluded greed was a “robust determinant of unethical behavior”.

Plato and Aristotle deemed greed to be at the root of personal immorality, arguing that greed drives desires for material gain at the expense of ethical standards.

Due to their more favorable beliefs about greed, upper class people are more willing to deceive and cheat others for personal gain.

Study 4 sought to provide experimental evidence that the experience of higher social class has a causal effect on unethical decision-making and behavior. It was the only study in which researchers manipulated participants into temporarily feeling either higher or lower in social class rank to test whether these feelings actually caused people to behave more or less unethically.

At the end of the study, the experimenter presented participants with a jar of individually wrapped candies, ostensibly for children in a nearby laboratory, but informed them that they could take some if they wanted. This task served as a measure of unethical behavior because taking candy would reduce the amount that would otherwise be given to children. People in this study, who were made to feel higher in social class rank, took approximately two times as much candy from children than did people who were made to feel lower in social class rank. Piff concluded:

Across all seven studies, the general pattern we find is that as a person’s social class increases, his or her tendency to behave unethically also increases.

Media Fuss about Qatada is Part of their Attack on Habeas Corpus

2012-02-14T18:26:00.006+01:00

The fuss about Abu Qatada is nonsense. All of it is to work up popular opinion against the Human Rights Act, and the European Court. Other countries have no trouble with either, and the UK Minister of Justice, Kenneth Clarke, only last week said it had nothing to do with the human rights court, but everything to do with justice. Like all of those captives in Guantanamo Gaol who have received no trial but nevertheless are imprisoned indefinitely, Abu Qatada has had no justice, but has been locked up for seven years. Since when has it been legal to jail anyone for life on an unproven allegation. Only since the odious Bush puppet, Tony Blair! Blair broke a principle of the law by bringing in his version of the US Patriot Act.

Blair effectively abolished habeas corpus, a fundamental principle of British law for 800 years. It meant that no one could be detained without trial. If this man, Qatada, is a danger, and all the news media seem to know he is, then he should be tried. If he is persona non grata here, but other countries like the USA want him for suspected acts of terror, then he can be extradited to them. We are extraditing Assange to Sweden en route to the USA, and various naïve hackers to the USA where they can legally be incarcerated for life over petty offences, and about three million imprisoned blacks in US jails vouch for it. He can even be extradited to Jordan, his home country, because it has enshrined guarantees against the use of torture, and evidence produced by torture, in a recent act (in 2011) to assure Europeans it respects human rights, and to facilitate the return of people like him to Jordan.

If the our secret services allege they have secret evidence that any of us are a danger to the public, any of us could be banged up indefinitely without proof of our guilt—because even if it exists, it is secret! Do not be taken in by emotive propaganda by the right wing media. It is in their interest to be able to jail anyone without evidence or trial. It is in our interest to have the protection of due process of the law.

Defend habeas corpus. It has saved thousands of people from arbitrary detention, and, if it goes, they’ll be able to bring back dungeons.

Class Warfare in America

2012-02-05T19:38:00.011+01:00

Gil Villagrán, MSW, Lecturer, School of Social Work, San Jose State University [gvillagran [at] casa.sjsu.edu] has posted this interesting factsheet for Class Warfare in America: a Teach-in for Occupy San Jose, lightly edited here for presentation.

Our nation’s class war began as early as 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia, established by the Virginia Company of London—a charter corporation granted by King James. English, Scot, Irish, Dutch, Polish, German and other European immigrants were recruited as indentured servants, working up to five years to pay off their indenture. Children born to these servants themselves became servants along with their parents in exchange for room and board. Many of the indentured did not live long enough to complete their five years of servitude. But seeking to lower costs and increase profits to the colony owners and managers (the CEOs of the period) by 1619 the first African slaves were imported for heavy work, unpaid, of course.

Descendants of these slaves, along with more recently “acquired” slaves under “privatized construction contracts” built many of the buildings in our nation’s capitol, including the Congress, White House, and Supreme Court.

The Class War in America has never ceased, and when the pernicious abuse of workers by the ruling ownership class becomes even more overwhelming, people have risen up to plead for food, fairness, safe working conditions and sustainable livelihoods. When such pleads are disregarded and people realize their economic masters do not care about fairness, human decency or Democracy, eventually they have armed themselves with more effective weapons (under those circumstances) than the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, or any moral philosophy or religious teaching of human rights.

The Class War by the ruling ownership class has been won over and over for almost 400 years in America, and in most of the world, by those in control of wealth, natural resources, government at every level who write the laws which are then enforced by courts, police, private mercenary militias, secret police, FBI, DEA, CIA, and countless other police state agencies, and finally when all else fails to subdue the rebellious people—the army attacks its own citizens. In most nations today, national armies are created, funded and used to protect the ruling class from rebellions civilians rather than from attacking armies of other nations.

The economic situation in 2011 America

The top 1 percent own 51 percent of Wall Street financial instruments—stocks, bonds, and mutual funds
The top 1 percent of American residents own 34 percent of all wealth, and have even more in financial instruments such are retirement accounts, mortgages, credit card debt, etc
The other 99 percent share the rest, but do not control most of it.
The bottom 50 percent of American residents share only 2.5 percent of the wealth
In the last 20 years CEO pay has risen 298 percent while minimum wage values has declined by 9.3 percent
Average effective hourly wages have not increased in 50 years!

The increasing chasm between wealthy, middle class and poor Americans

From 1979 to 2005, the top 1 percent gained $673 billion in combined annual income, an average annual household income gain of $597,000
The middle class lost an average of $8,600 annually
The bottom 20 percent suffered a loss of $5,600

The truly rich pay less tax than all other classes

From 1992 to 2007, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes had an average increase in income of 392 percent while their tax rate decreased by 37 percent.
So, buying Congress is the best investment for the 400 richest Americans!

War on Poverty

President Johnson’s 1960s War on Poverty was lost in the jungles of Vietnam, which cost at least one trillion dollars, and created a generation of disabled, traumatized and thousands of homeless veterans—many living in San Jose.

The economic safety net initiated by the FDR New Deal programs, generally successful in caring for the aged, disabled, widows and children until the 1980 Reagan War on the Poor, is now a tattered net with gaping holes that determined that many Americans are (unlike “banks that are too big to fail”) too sick, too mentally ill, too addicted, too criminal, too “feral” to save from living in the streets, eating out of garbage cans, sleeping in trash bins.

The cruel fraud of so-called Safety Net

There is no national federal minimum wage, most states legislate a statewide minimum wage. In California the wage is $8 per hour. $8 per hour x 40 hours x 52 weeks is an annual wage of $16,640, but the 2011 Federal Poverty Level for a family of three is $18,530. Therefore a full-time parent in a real job earns almost $2,000 less than the poverty level!

But these wages are before all the deductions for federal, state, local, SS (wage) taxes, UIB, are taken from the worker. There are also exemptions from the minimum wages for part-time workers, trainees, extra help, restaurant servers, seasonal, farmworkers, children, and of course the undocumented who are easily exploitable. Many of our nation’s 3 million incarcerated prisoners are cajoled into prison labor not unlike the chain gangs of earlier times. There is also the underground economy filled with human trafficked wage and sex slaves.

Most of the poor in America are not poor because they do not work, but rather are poor because they earn their poverty every day they work by such low wages.

Which class do you belong to?

Earnings from work, and not including assets such as property, financial investments—stocks and other income producing assets. 2005 earnings data, Dept of Labor:

Lower class—25 percent of workers: annual income, $10,000 to $22,500
Middle class—33 percent of workers (mainly high school educated): $30,000 to $62,000
Upper middle class—25 percent of workers (mainly college graduates): $77,500 and higher
Top class—5 percent (graduate or professional) $167,000 and higher
Megarich class—top 1 percent (CEO top management) $350,000 and more.

Who are the very poor in our society?

One out of five children live in poverty all of their childhood—their parents’ struggle to provide often ends in failure to self-recrimination
One out of five seniors will die in poverty
African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Single moms recent immigrants are twice as likely to be poor
50 million American live in or on the edge of desperate poverty
Health care costs are the major cause of home foreclosure and bankruptcy

The American Corporate Plutocracy

The truly rich do not earn their money from labor of any sort, but from earnings on investments. The highest wealth in America is now inherited wealth—that is, based upon who your parents were—like back in the days of the founding of the nation. America is a land with a new kind of aristocracy—a corporate aristocracy based upon wealth amassed from corporate profits.

What are the lower and middle class workers to the megarich class?

We are worker bees, the drones that make or sell and certainly buy the products, who clean the offices and factories, and fight their wars. Also critically, it is the lower class and middle class who build and pay in taxes for the vast infrastructure that enables corporations to function: the transportation, energy, communications networks; the water and sewage systems; and the educational system that trains workers, managers and executives.

We also provide another critical function of society—the police and criminal justice system to keep public safety and prevent lawlessness or even insurrection, and the vast military to ensure the American empire continues to function in the world. Who fills these ranks?

The lower and middle class. Wealthy youth. George W Bush, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, Michael Bloomberg, etc) never risk their lives as beat cops or rank soldiers, but for the lower class, these are considered good jobs with higher than low wages and the prestige of serving your community and your nation.

American Dream?

Current middle class wages are not enough to afford a middle class lifestyle of owning a home—even if it takes a lifetime to pay for it—sending your children to college, expecting some upward mobility. In the last five years, actual working class wages have remained constant while income for the top 1 percent increased 23 percent. Imagine such a raise in your wages. It is unlikely to happen. The “American Dream” project of the “Change to Win Federation” identifies four elements to the American Dream:

a job that pays to support your family
affordable health care
being able to ensure your children have opportunity to succeed
and having a secure and dignified retirement.

How many middle class Americans are certain they can achieve these goals? If we have an endangered middle class, then are we witnessing the eclipse of the American Dream?

Republicans Attracted to Repulsive Sights, Liberals Avoid Them

2012-02-01T22:56:00.008+01:00

It is said that conservatives and liberals do not see things in the same way. Recent findings make that clear—quite literally. In a series of experiments, researchers closely monitored physiological reactions and eye movements of participants shown combinations of pleasant and unpleasant images on a screen. To gauge subjects’ physiological responses, electrodes measured subtle skin conductance changes indicating an emotional response. The cognitive data were gathered by fitting subjects with eye tracking equipment that captured even the most subtle of eye movements while the images were on the screen.

Conservatives had stronger reactions to and looked longer at the unpleasant images like an open wound, a crashed car or a dirty toilet than liberals
Liberals had stronger reactions to and looked longer at the pleasant images like a beach ball or a bunny rabbit than conservatives.

Conservatives seem to focus on and respond more to negative stimuli while liberals focus on and respond more to positive stimuli. Conservatives responded physiologically more to images of Democratic politicians—presumed to be a unpleasant to them—than they did to presumably agreeable pictures of Republicans. Liberals, on the other hand, had a stronger physiological response to Democratic figures—presumed to be an agreeable stimulus to them—than they did to images of the Republicans, presumed disagreeable to them.

Ultimately the research suggests Republicans are rubberneckers, attracted to unpleasant and gory sights, while liberals find even thoughts of such horrors unpleasant. Who then seems more likely to be a warmonger, a torturer or apologist for torture, and a believer that the pacific Jesus Christ of the gospels is really Rambo Jesus? No prizes for this one.

Impose a Supertax to Recoup the Money Robbed from our National Treasuries

2012-01-28T01:46:00.005+01:00

After the UK bank bailouts in 2007-8, which the National Audit Office said emptied the British exchequer by almost a trillion pounds, UK Labour Chancellor, Alistair Darling, said the banks were henceforth to show restraint, and boasted of the 50 percent supertax he had imposed on bankers’ bonuses. Actually, it was a one-off payroll tax that would only raise £550 million—about 0.06 percent of the money the robbers had received. The bleating professional defenders of the City called it a fresh attack on that sacred institution, but nothing is being said about it now that banks are rewarding their executives, like Stephen Hester of RBS, for that staggering robbery of the treasuries of all the leading capitalist countries, leaving everyone except the ruling junker class tantamount to being bankrupt.

The measure, feeble and ineffective as it was, would prompt defections from the City, the publicity lobbyists claimed. All of these bankers can, apparently, get immensely rewarding jobs anywhere else in the world, and now they shall! It is their own propaganda, though doubtless, like all greedy opportunists, they believe it. And Darling said the banks would actually pay the bonuses tax, so the burden again falls on us, guileless slaves of the rich, whether it is through the exchequer or through the banks that we are robbed. John Whiting, tax policy director of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, immediately warned that the banks would find ways around the tax!

Bonuses are only part of the problem. Income tax is not merely unfair, it is regressive—the richer you are, the less you pay. One of the very richest men in the USA, Warren Buffett, has openly admitted that his tax rate (18 percent) is lower than that of his lower class secretary (30 percent). Can anyone deny that it is grossly unfair that the rich should pay less national tax than those who are much poorer? How is it possible? When income tax was introduced temporarily in 1842, even Queen Victoria paid it. The monarchy later, when it became a normal feature of government funding, was excused it. But in 1992, the British Queen volunteered to pay it again—no doubt with some persuasion—but hoping to gain popularity at a time when monarchy was under criticism.

In 1909, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, set income tax at 9d (9 pence) in the pound (3.75 cents in the dollar), for incomes less than £2,000, which amounts to about £160,000 at 2012 values. He set a higher rate of 12d (one shilling, or 5 percent) for incomes above £2,000, and an additional “surtax” or “supertax” of 6d (another 2.5 percent) on the amount by which incomes of £5,000 (£400,000 today) or more exceeded £3,000 (£240,000 today). This scheme, applied today, would mean rich people simply pay tax, not supertax, on earnings up to £240,000, but would owe the exchequer £4,000 as soon as they earned £400,000. Effectively, the rich would experience a hike in tax of just 1 percent of their income when they went through the £400,000 barrier, hardly a backbreaking jump. As things stand, the megarich would simply hire top accountants, lawyers and lobbyists to ensure the nation never gets the money they owe it, if everyone else does! But, if this sudden hike were sufficiently large, and avoidance and evasion of it were treated strictly as criminal, banks and corporations would not be inclined to overpay directors, and they would not want to recieve more than the limit and suffer the penalty of the tax barrier.

Republicans brag that, when they took Congress in 1994, they lowered taxes creating an improvement in the economy, and higher tax revenues. Since then they have perpetually called for the same strategem, even though the improvement they boasted of was short lived. What they want is lower taxes for the rich, but it is cutting taxation of the poor and middle classes that improves spending, business transactions, and ultimately the economy as a whole. Money rises like a gas through the classes of any capitalist society like ours, it does not trickle down like water, at least, if it does, it does not trickle down at home where it is needed!

Time series suggest that governments resist raising tax from the rich except in crises. Then they have sometimes lifted taxation into the supertax category of over 90 percent. When this is done, the revenue is fed in at the base of the economy in public projects and better benefits, lifting spending power at the base and thereby stimulating the economy throughout by the multiplier effect—the way each dollar or pound is spent over and over again, once someone poor gets it to spend in the first place, and the way an initial expenditure triggers further ones, like a tin of paint for the front door stimulating the decoration of the rest of the house, which now looks shabby, then new furniture, and with fresh aspirations, a new car, a new home, and so on. It is Keynesianism. It works! So, taxing the richest boosts the economy. Reducing taxes on the rich induces them to accumulate more capital which they regretably are too often ready to invest overseas for even better profits. Meanwhile, our own economy is deprived of liquidity and unemployment and poverty rise. Tax rates for the richest were being cut until 1928, but they failed to stop, and arguably exacerbated the Great Crash of 1929 and the following long depression, ended only by WWII. Our situation today is frighteningly similar.

Curiously, considering that the upper classes in the USA—not to mention many of the middle classes too, albeit perhaps influenced too much by patriotic propaganda—constantly demand foreign wars, the top rates of income tax go up while wars are being fought and afterwards when their costs have to be met. In WWI, the top US rate of income tax reached 77 percent, but in the aftermath of WWII it went as high as 94 percent. The US Right Wing, who bleat their propaganda line that Obama is a “commie” when he is not being a Moslem or a Satanist, would be certain that supertax equates to communism. Yet it has inevitably preceded the US economy picking up, so that the supertax was soon lifted. Perhaps too soon. UK supertax was lifted in 1973, but replaced by rates of income tax progressiing from zero for the very poorest to much higher levels for the rich, albeit falling short of a supertax. Maybe now, it should be a permanent feature of the modern capitalist state.

HM Revenue and Customs (UK) claims that twice in the post-war years, special tax rates have pushed income tax above 100 percent. Sad parasites of other people’s work received unearned income from stocks and shares, and apparently paid the taxman more than they earned. They must have been Warren Buffets living in cardboard boxes under railway arches. It is a highly dubious calculation which must assume that the different rates are applied additively. They were not. Some rates were either/or, not both in succession. No wonder the tax men leave the calculations to each of us ourselves to submit via self assessment. The people who do pay rates of over 100 percent are the poorest—those on benefits who lose all of certain benefits when they earn above certain levels of income. Unless the increase in income exceeds that lost by loss of benefits, income declines, so the effective tax rate of such poor people is over 100 percent. This is very common indeed, and explains why many people give up looking for work.

When a nation is divided into two contending classes, both cannot have their own way. Democracy is meant to ensure the majority rules, subject to its laws not oppressing the minority, but, for that, it has to be fair. It is not fair when one section owns all the media, and the rich can do that through their wealth. The American paranoia about socialism leads ordinary Americans to accept the rich man’s propaganda, and support the rich man’s interests contrary to their own. So that when sensible policies are proposed the people are confused by those who want a less practicable and more greedy policy, so that what emerges is precisely the wrong kind—acquiescence in wasteful policies, such as militarism and imperialism, rather than taking steps in the right direction.

The British Labour Party has exactly the same problem. Beguiled by Blairism and topped up in the Blair years with careerists and opportunists, it is quite incapabale of taking the right decisions. Even though the Con Dem coalition is on shaky ground, and the people are sick of the succession of Thatcherite policies over the last thirty years by successive governments, the Labour leadership is tied to its outdated mode of thinking—deregulated neo-liberalism—when something new, and actually left wing is needed in the face of the bankers and the junkers.

Cut the Working Week to Share Out the Work

2012-01-27T02:31:00.003+01:00

Our economic system urging both parents to work causes immense damage to children. 20 per cent of young people aged 18-24 are unemployed in the UK, a far higher rate than for the rest of the age range (16-64), which was 8.4 per cent. In the US, the unemployment rate of 16-24 year olds was a staggering 53.4 per cent! Yet the government continually increases the retirement age forcing the elderly to work in the expectation that they will die without ever collecting a state pension, while the youth have zero prospects. Does this make any social sense? It will leave a generation of young people wasting their youths struggling to find work, while the elderly have to work to avoid pension poverty.

It is all part of the One Percent's strategy of bringing on a Third World wage economy by driving people to accept low pay or face losing their jobs in factory closures and switches to the Third World. This was proved by a report from the UK Labour Force Survey which found 5.3 million workers put in an average of 7.2 hours of unpaid overtime a week last year, worth around £5,300 a year per person.

What is needed for social and economic fairness is, first, for the rich One Percent to cough up more of their accummulated wealth—in short, for them to pay their whack to alleviate a crisis brought on by their own greed. Then, second, for everyone else the available work should be shared fairly. A shorter flexible working week would provide more free time, allowing parents to spend more of it with their children, and teenagers more chance to get work skills. 20 hours a week seems a sensible sort of level, but the whole idea flies in the face of orthodoxy. If wage rates remained the same, many people could not afford it, so other changes would have to be made. Readjustments have to be made—increasing pensions and reducing the retirement age, allowing jobs to be released for the young to get essential work experience.

One idea touted for long is that everyone should get a state allowance—rather like the UK Child Allowance—replacing multiple benefits, then those who would rather not work, the elderly, the infirm, yes and those content not to work but live on a low income but be able to develop their personal skills, be educated better, become artists, musicians, develop their own businesses They need not be employed, leaving them free to do as they wished, while those motivated by remuneration could fulfil their own ambitions. In this increasingly technological world, we all, governments too, have to get used to the fact that when robots are doing the work, employment will be at a premium, but businesses and the economy still requires people, employed or not, to be able to spend. Robots do not. Without spending power no one can buy, and no one can make money serving robots!

2012-01-02T15:45:00.004+01:00

Anybody recognize this?-

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It is the very beginning of the Constitution of the United States, of what is called the Preamble to it. This opening sentence declares clearly the purpose of the constitution, and you will note it includes “establish Justice”, and “promote the general Welfare”, not to mention “insure domestic Tranquility”.

It is easy to understand why rich, right wing demagogues like Rick Perry do not want to accept these fundamentals of the constitution, but why on earth do ordinary US citizens listen to these greedy Republican half wits, spouting off their own interests while confounding the foundational law of the USA. The whole selection procedure is a farce. None of them care who get selected as long as they stick to the right wing game plan. Their slight interest is to go down in history on the list of presidents, but they have no intention of serving “the people”—only their own people. They are selfish frauds. Humiliate them!

Market Manipulation “Bear Raid” Contributed to the 2007 Financial Crisis

2011-12-22T03:45:00.003+01:00

Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, President of New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), and his team of analysts support suspicions that a type of market manipulation called bear raids played a role in the market crash at the beginning of the financial crisis in November 2007. Any bear raid would have been prevented by a regulation that was repealed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in July 2007. The regulation, known as the price test or the “uptick rule”, meant to prevent manipulation and promote stability was in force from 1938 as part of the government response to the 1928 market crash and its consequences.

At a critical point in the financial crisis, the stock of Citigroup was attacked by the bear raid—traders sold stock they did not own (so called “borrowed shares”) with the expectation of buying the stock cheaper when the price fell (“short-selling”) thereby getting a profit from trading in a falling market. If enough rich do this in cahoots, the glut of lower priced stock actually causes the price to fall, inducing panic selling by other price watching traders—or their price watching robots! Thus the risk can be totally eliminated by coordinated trading like this. Of course, if a single trader is wealthy enough, it might be that no co-ordination is needed!

Through its analysis of stock market data not generally available to the public, namely the “borrowing” of shares, NECSI reconstructs the chain of events. On November 1, 2007, Citigroup experienced an unusual increase in trading volume and decrease in price. This decline coincided with an anomalous increase in “borrowed shares” by 100 million shares, valued at almost $6 billion, the selling of which was a large fraction of the total trading volume. The trading on November 1 was almost four times the usual volume. The newly borrowed shares represented over three-quarters of the volume on that day, driving prices down by almost 7 percent. The selling of borrowed shares cannot be explained by news events as there is no corresponding increase in selling by share owners. A similar number of shares were returned on a single day six days later. By the time the shares were returned, it had dropped nearly 20 percent. The magnitude and coincidence of borrowing and returning of shares is evidence of a concerted effort to drive down Citigroup’s stock price and achieve a profit, ie, a bear raid.

This was no coincidence. Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam maintains:

When 100 million shares are borrowed on a single day and then returned on a single day, the evidence that this is a concerted action is hard to refute. The likelihood of such an event happening by coincidence is one in a trillion.

The NECSI scholars are concerned that the incident was allowed to happen. Selling shares to deliberately cause a price drop, to induce others to buy or sell is illegal. Interpretations and analyses of financial markets should consider the possibility that the intentional actions of individual actors or coordinated groups can impact market behavior. Markets are not sufficiently transparent to reveal even major market manipulation events. Regulations are needed to prevent intentional actions that cause markets to deviate from equilibrium and contribute to crashes. Bar-Yam said:

There used to be a rule that prevented it from happening by forbidding borrowed shares from being sold in large blocks that drive the price down. Last year, the authors of the report sent preliminary results of their study to the financial services committee of Congress, and Congressmen Barney Frank and Ed Perlmutter sent it to the SEC.

Unfortunately, the SEC has not acted to identify or prosecute those responsible or to prevent its occurring in the future. Enforcing the law after it is violated is much less effective than preventing it from happening in the first place. Enforcement actions cannot reverse severe damage to the economic system. Prevention may be achieved through improved availability of market data and the original uptick rule or other transaction limitations.

After the market crash, the SEC received thousands of requests from the public to reinstate the price test rule. Hedge funds that invest the money of wealthy individuals opposed its reinstatement. Eventually, the SEC put into place an “alternative” rule that only applies a price test when the price of a share drops more than 10 percent, but that is insufficient. Professor Bar-Yam points out:

This watered-down rule would not have stopped the bear raid on Citigroup on November 1, 2007. This is only one example of the deleterious effects of the weakened rule. The overall effect of unregulated selling of borrowed shares is surely much larger and continues today.

Media and Ruling Class Undermine Social Values by Labelling Valid Demands as Extreme

2011-12-12T01:31:00.008+01:00

Ever wonder why the media will report a few protesters breaking windows or fighting police when a hundred times as many register their protest peacefully? Naturally, like much media focus, it distracts from the purpose of the protest, but new research shows how support for a popular cause can be cut by labeling it as “radical” or “extreme”. Thomas Nelson, co-author of the study and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said that is why calling political opponents extremists is so effective, and popular as a political tactic. he added:

The beauty of using this “extremism” tactic is that you don’t have to attack a popular value that you know most people support. You just have to say that its supporters are going too far or are too extreme.

And people fall for it because we mostly consider ourselves civilized, and not at all extreme, and so tend to divorce ourselves from the extreme cause or group, even though we might actually prefer it given a fair chance. Thus people supported a gender equality policy when other supporters were not mentioned, but when the proposers of the same policy were described as “radical feminists”, participants in the study supported the policy much less.

Experiments in Evidence

1. 233 undergraduate students were asked to read and comment on an essay that they were told appeared on a blog. The blog entry discussed the controversy concerning the Augusta National Golf Club’s “men only” membership policy. This policy caused a controversy in 2003 before the club hosted the Masters Tournament. Participants read one of three versions of an essay which argued that the PGA Tour should move the Masters Tournament if the club refused to change this policy:

One group read that the proposal to move the tournament was led by “people” or “citizens”.
Another group read that the proposal was led by “feminists”.
The third group read that the proposal was led by “radical feminists”, “militant feminists”, and “extremists”.

Additional language reinforced the extremist portrayals by describing extreme positions that the groups allegedly held on other issues, such as getting rid of separate locker room and restroom facilities for men and women.

Participants were then asked to rate how much they supported Augusta changing its membership rules to allow women members, whether they supported the Masters tournament changing its location, and whether, if they were a member, they would vote to support female membership at the club.

The findings showed that participants were more supportive of the golf club and its rules banning women, less likely to support moving the tournament, and less likely to support female membership, when the proposal to move the tournament was described in language redolent of extremism and radical feminism. Nelson explained:

All three groups in the study read the exact same policy proposals. But those who read that the policy was supported by “radical feminists” were significantly less likely to support it than those who read it was supported by “feminists” or just “citizens”.

By associating a policy with unpopular groups, opponents are able to get people to lose some respect for the value it represents, like feminism or environmentalism.

2. In another experiment, 116 participants read the same blog entry used in the previous experiment. Again, the blog entry supported proposals to allow women to join the golf club. One version simply attributed the proposal to citizens, while the other two attributed them to feminists or radical feminists.

Next, the subjects ranked four values in order of their importance as they thought about the issue of allowing women to join the club:

upholding the honor and prestige of the Masters golf tournament
freedom of private groups to set up their own rules
equal opportunities for both men and women
maintaining high standards of service for members of private clubs.

How people felt about the relative importance of these values depended on what version of the essay they read:

Of those participants who read the proposal attributed simply to citizens, 42 percent rated equality above the other three values. But only 32 percent who read the same proposal attributed to extremists thought equality was the top value.
On the other hand, 41 percent rated group freedom as the top value when they read the proposal attributed to citizens. But 52 percent gave freedom the top ranking when they read the proposal attributed to extremists.

Observations and Conclusions

Nelson commented:

Tying the proposal to feminist extremists directly affected the relative priority people put on gender equality v group freedom, which in turn affected how they felt about this specific policy. Perhaps thinking about some of the radical groups that support gender equality made some people lose respect for that value in this case.

This tactic of attacking a policy by tying it to supposedly extremist supporters goes on all the time in politics. Opponents of President Obama’s health care reform initiative attacked the policy by calling Obama a “socialist” and comparing the president to Adolf Hitler. Nelson explained:

These tactics can work when people are faced with competing values and are unsure what their priorities should be.

Environmental values, for example, may sometimes conflict with economic values if clean air or clean water laws make it more difficult for companies to earn a profit.

If you want to fight against a proposed environmental law, you can’t publicly say you’re against protecting the environment, because that puts you in the position of fighting a popular value. So instead, you say that proponents of the proposed law are going to extremes, and are taking the value too far.

The problem with this tactic for society is that it damages support of the underlying values, as well as the specific policy. Nelson:

If you use this extremism language, it can make people place less of a priority on the underlying value. People may become less likely to think environmentalism or gender equality are important values.

Maybe that is why supporters of the Republican Party in the USA seem to be utterly immoral and obnoxious in general, although large numbers of them profess Christianity. As their bibles say, if they ever got round to reading them, you cannot serve God and Mammon. They serve Mammon, and so their Christian values, if they had them in the first place, evaporate.

When the media run down anyone whose policies seem fair and right, remember these studies. Even civilized people might have to protest violently to stop the propagation of obnoxious and selfish ones by the 1% and their media and academic lackeys. So look carefully at what extremists are extreme about. You might agree with them.

Antisemitism, a Convenient Hatred

2011-12-09T22:15:00.005+01:00

The Huffington Post invites authors to publish articles about antisemitism but suppresses any critical responses. Antisemitism, a Convenient Hatred was one such written by Phyllis Goldstein and published a few days ago. It is a plug for her book, A Convenient Hatred: A History of Antisemitism. It is a short article with little that is not accepted in it, such as the role of Christianity in antisemitism, and the behavior of the church and European aristocracy. The real question is whose aims today is this hatred convenient for? Goldstein begins thus:

Many people thought antisemitism would disappear after the Holocaust, but it did not. Nor did it disappear when many Christian churches acknowledged that Jews were not responsible for the crucifixion. And antisemitism and other hatreds have persisted despite tough laws against discrimination, hate crimes and hate speech. To understand why hatreds endure, we have to confront history. Histories that are not confronted can never be reconciled and yet most people—including many Jews—know very little about the history of antisemitism.

Thereafter she goes back to those ancient histories mention above. What she does not address, and perhaps it was because the article was too short to do so, is the most relevant explanation today. It is that antisemitism is a valued tool of Zionism. I therefore pointed it out. The comment never got published! I wrote:

Modern antisemitism is being studiously promoted by Zionists and the Zionist state of Israel as the recent adverts calling upon Jews to return to Israel show. The notion of the fear of a future holocaust however goes right back to the Jewish scriptures. It is the fear generated by the strictures of the Mosaic law and emphasized by the Deuteronomic Historian. "Obey the law or be reduced to a remnant." The threat of such a destruction strengthens a community by emphasizing the bonds that unite it and distinguish it.

Zionists have made the most of this idea since the war, using the millions of Jewish dead to promote their own racialist and elitist, neo-fascist politics. Uri Avnery cites Yehayahu Leibowitz as having said to him, "The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust." It defines goyim as potentially irrational mass murderers of Jews, generating distrust in the diaspora while promoting antisemitism and emigration to the Zionist state, and making "vengeance into an acceptable western value", according to Gilad Atzmon.

"The Jew" is the new God of the Zionist religion, Atzmon, a Jew himself, tells us, the idealized image of the suffering, innocent Jews of the Nazi death camps, they use for their political ends, though the Zionist Jews of Israel are the bullies of the Middle east today, backed by the world's big bully, the pro-Zionist leadership of the USA.

What Zionist Jews Need To Remember

2011-11-30T23:29:00.005+01:00

From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught… that the Jewish claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as the Torah tells us, “vomit you out” if people did not live according to the highest moral vision of Torah. Over and over again, the Torah repeated its most frequently stated mitzvah (command):

When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger; the other, the one who is an outsider of your society, the powerless one and then not only “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” but also “you shall love the other”.
Rabbi Lerner

Ha Aretz (The Land) was granted to the Jews as a tenancy only on certain conditions as Rabbi Lerner says. Jews were not to oppress the stranger. And God also said what the punishment would be for not complying. Ezekiel (33:24-29) received Yehouah's words of warning to the Jews who boasted that “the land is given to us for a possession”, as follows:

So says the Lord Yehouah: You eat on the blood, and you lift your eyes up to your idols, and you shed blood. And shall you possess the land? You stand on your sword, and you each do abominations, defiling his neighbor's wife. And shall you possess the land?
Says the Lord Yehouah: I will give the one who is on the face of the field to the beasts to be eaten, and those in the forts and in the caves shall die by the plague. For I shall make the land desolate and a waste, and the pride of her strength shall cease. And the heights of Israel shall be a waste that none will go through.
And they shall know that I am Yehouah, when I have made the land desolate and a waste because of all their abominations which they have done.

Many Zionists think or assume that Ha Aretz was given to the Jews as their possession, and base their religious and political beliefs on this thinking, but it is not so. The most orthodox Jews rightly reject it. So too should Christians. To be serious, they should be proselytizing Israelis, but that they fail to do. At the very least they should be deterring Jews from oppressing Palestinians as being utterly contrary to anything that Jesus taught. They do that even less.

Primate Leaders Chosen for Popularity not Dominance or Aggression

2011-11-18T23:51:00.002+01:00

The best leaders of the wild chacma baboons of Namibia are the most sociable ones, those with lots of friends. Dr Andrew King of the Royal Veterinary College in the University of London, who led the study, wanted to know how groups of baboons manage to stick together when searching for food. When deciding where to eat, it makes sense for individual baboons to agree on where to go and then go together, otherwise they would lose the benefits of being in a group.

Initially the researchers thought the leaders’ grunting or backward glances might have been the cue that triggers the troop to follow. But it wasn’t. Baboons glancing back were less likely to be followed. These monkeys live in open country where looking and following may be more important than grunting, but in wooded and forested areas making noises might have been more important.

Nor did sex or dominance matter, even though the alpha male did tend to be more successful than most at initiating foraging trips. The troop do not automatically follow the dominant male everywhere. When any baboon sets off in search of food, the others may follow, depending on whether the initiator is popular in the grooming network. The troop is unlikely to follow less popular baboons. The alpha male might lead the troop but not because he is dominant or aggressive, but because he is popular. That in itself might be enhanced by his dominance and value as an ally. King et al likens it to humans being more likely to respond to suggestions by popular figures.

Social relationships are really important. Research by colleagues working with baboons in Kenya and Botswana has shown that female baboons who get on best with others tend to have more babies, and these babies are more likely to get to adulthood and have young of their own.
Dr A King

We humans are social primates. We choose our leaders nowadays by a popularity poll called an election, but we have no personal experience of the people we choose. We go by video clips and sound bites to judge who seems the most pleasant or dynamic, and since we very often find we are wrong within a few months, we know we are being misled more often than not. These men (mostly) have to seem nice, so have blindingly white teeth to match their rictus smiles, and are usually tolerably good looking.

The trouble is thast most of them are using us for their own personal gain, and not serving us as our representatives, as the founders of democracy imagined. Our real leaders are those rich enough to buy the politicians, have the power and money to do it, and the incentive to stay on top. They are the 1 percent. These people need to be controlled by law for democracy to work properly. That is the point of the revolution against our present bent system.

This is What a Police State Looks Like

2011-11-18T01:00:00.003+01:00

This is What a Police State Looks Like

2011-11-18T01:00:00.000+01:00

Health Act Review Will Show Whether the Supreme Court is Impartial

2011-11-18T00:21:00.003+01:00

John Case of WSHC offers the following points in regard of the Supreme Court decision to “review” Obama’s health care act because its “mandate” for nearly universal coverage may be unconstitutional. Even the right wing majority of judges on the Supreme Court should only need to take about ten minutes to make their decision. The commerce clause of the US Constitution unambiguously declares:

Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

If the health care act violates any supposed mandate preventing US citizens from being obliged to pay for general welfare as well as defense, then all taxation must be illegal too. It might sound like paradise for the rich 1 percent, but it will mean the country will cease to be manageable.

It would mean we can all refuse to pay for foreign wars, or refuse to pay for a fire department on the grounds that some of us don’t need it. We all need a fire service and we all need health care. A decision against the health care act will mean working people will be denied coverage for a host of pre-existing conditions for which they are now covered, under the act. Perhaps, instead of reviewing this act, they should review the Citizens United decision that has empowered the rich and corporations to corrupt the political process anonymously and without financial limit. The New York Times offers competent guidance in this case:

All of these issues are best resolved in the political system, not the courts. The Supreme Court ought to show judicial restraint, adhere to precedent and uphold the constitutionality of health care reform.

But don’t hold your breath. This Supreme Court:

reversed the will of the American people in the Bush/Gore election
stood by allowing Texas to become a death state
okayed the arrests and imprisonment of refugees
undercut the rights of women to control their own bodies
nullifies democracy at every turn, in favor of corporate interests.

If it approves this phony move against health care it removes its cloak of legal impartiality. It will openly declare itself an arm of the Republican party.

Regulation and Severe Personal Penalties Needed to Get Ethical Management

2011-11-16T00:20:00.005+01:00

Many accountants believed that markets are efficient and as such, a lot of the issues of earnings management would be corrected by the markets. But this belief has changed over time, and we understand better now that earnings manipulation occurs and does indeed affect markets.
Prof Ramy Elitzur, University of Toronto

The case of Enron is famous. The scandal in 2009 at Satyam Computer Services was called India’s Enron. The bank collapses in the last few years are worse. Satyam’s chairman, Ramalinga Raju, admitted to years of systematic inflation of earnings and assets, beginning with small manipulations of account statements that eventually inflated hugely. Elitzur:

For a long time we’ve asked ourselves, “How come smart, rational people carry out short term schemes that in the long-term undoubtedly are going to sink them?”.

So why do corporate managers do it? Why do they lie about their companies’ earnings eventually damaging themselves and their company. Elitzur, who is Edward J Kernaghan Professor in Financial Analysis said:

The answer is “we’re not rational”. We’re rational only in a limited sense.

A limited capacity to see the whole picture, known as “bounded rationality”, and a faulty ethical compass are the main reasons. More important perhaps, and certainly as important, is why shareholders let them get away with it. Elitzur’s study finds shareholders are just as guilty as their CEOs. They have the same weaknesses. In particular their opportunities for insider trading—an illegal practice still—is linked to the CEO’s earnings manipulation.

Prof Elitzur says that it took a decade to develop his model and get it published partly because of corporate resistance to his findings.

The study model combines game theory—used to predict strategic behaviour—with the idea of bounded rationality, that our decisions are always made within bounds, within the limits of available time, information, and the human capacity to analyze it. Rather obviously, Elitzur says:

If we would like to have managers who engage less in earnings manipulation and insider trading, we should look for managers who are more ethical, and suffer less from bounded rationality.

What is less obvious, indeed counter-intuitive, but potentially vitally important is that Elitzur’s model suggests that choosing less ethical managers is not in the best interests of shareholders, unless they are sold on dishonesty. Penalizing unethical and damaging behaviour and anyone encouraging it is the atraightforward way of stopping it from happening. Some provisions are already in place in the US to guard against these tendencies, the authors conclude.

But the fresh regulation that is desperately needed in our business and banking sectors, at the very top ought to include severe penalties for such transgressions. Pleas of ignorance should not be an adequate defence, for ignorance at the top is then negligence and that too should be severely penalized. Perhaps in such cases of criminal negligence, the notion of limited liability should be dropped. Negligent CEOs ought to be liable for the damage they have caused.

The Jolly Euro Roger—Euro Bankers’ Flag

2011-11-15T23:07:00.003+01:00

Join the Protests against the Greedy Bankers and their Rich Clients

2011-11-14T23:30:00.006+01:00

Politicians, most recently European ones, tell us the bankers know best, and so we are wise to let them be in charge of defaulting economies like Greece and Italy. No democratic elections have been held to let the voters pick a new government but technocrats are bringing in total banking domination, as the world’s real economies go down the tubes. So much for the democracy that our banking paid politicians go to wars so frequently in the name of.

Now bankers lent money to weak economies in the first place, so, in the logic of capitalism, bankers made bad investments, and when those weak nations default on their debts, the bankers ought to carry the can. Instead they are given control of the defaulting countries—with the cover propaganda echoing through our ever so fair and democratic media that the countries are bankrupt—so that they must impose austerity, squeeze the people, sack government employees, thereby increasing government costs and decreasing tax income, with the outcome that the banks can lend more to the blighted nation to incur more returns for the banks! It is insane for everyone except bankers and their clients, the über rich class.

At one time, pre-Reagan and Thatcher, if banks took undue risk, they were penalized by the system, but, since Reagan and Thatcher set the greed ball rolling, the more risk bankers take the greater the rewards they get, being bailed out at the cost of empty treasuries when necessary rather than letting the duds and cowboys go bankrupt, and to jail.

Interest rates are zero or fractional per cent so the money is not fed back to customers as a reward for keeping their assets safe, as they used to be, and banks were intended to do. While the banks pay negligible percent, they are lending the money, everyone put in their care, to defaulting countries at exhorbitant interest rates, effectively directly extracting the difference in interest earned from the people working in that country into the banker’s coffers. With bank deposits yielding almost nothing, and inflation growing, the banks are effectively robbing the accounts of their customers. Such blatant larceny and theft has not been seen since the Nazis stole from Jews and opponents in Germany in the 30s.

Yet these gangsters, banksters, bandits are being put in charge of our destinies to preserve the fortunes of the 1 percent of very wealthy people. Join the protests against them. Your own rights are rapidly disappearing. Defend them!