Dismantling the Corporate State

                                             

By Reginald Johnson 

                  

              

                America has slid into a form of  “corporate totalitarianism”  where basic rights and freedoms outlined in our Constitution have been wiped away.

            The only thing that will restore our rights will be a mass movement, similar to the labor movement and civil rights movements of years past,  where people defy the government and engage in acts of civil disobedience.

            That’s the view of one of America’s leading intellectuals, Chris Hedges, the author of numerous books on America’s social condition and a former reporter for The New York Times.  Speaking at a recent conference on civil liberties at Central Connecticut State University, Hedges said the establishment of a mass surveillance system, repressive new laws and corporate power have made democracy in the United States  “a fiction.” There is only one way to turn it around. 

            “Reform will only come through building mass movements and alternative centers of power that can overthrow --- let me repeat that word for Homeland Security --- overthrow the corporate state,” he said.           

 Hedges was the keynote speaker at the conference sponsored by the Connecticut Coalition to Stop Indefinite Detention. The gathering also featured workshops and panel discussions on issues related to prisoners, discrimination against Muslims, deportations, drones, unlawful detentions and other civil liberties subjects.

A 20-year foreign correspondent who reported in East Germany and Czechoslovakia under communist rule, as well as in El Salvador and Guatemala during the civil wars in the 1980s, Hedges said the United States is taking on many of the characteristics of the dictatorial regimes he once covered.

    Under the guise of fighting terrorism, a vast surveillance apparatus has been set up through the National Security Agency and the FBI, which allows the government to learn everything about you --- who you are communicating with, what your views are, what your activities are, where you travel, and if you’ve had any personal issues or problems in the past. As whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed, the NSA sweeps up phone calling “metadata” of all Americans as well as their emails.

   The FBI, through legislation passed after 911, can secretly gain your personal information by issuing warrantless National Security Letters to anyone --- your employer, your bank, your doctor, your friends or a library, Hedges said.  They also have the technical capabilities through cell phones and GPS systems to track your geographical movements.

Moreover, “they will store this information for perpetuity in government computers,” Hedges said.

Additionally, under the Section 1021 provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, the government now has the power to arrest an American citizen simply on the basis that they might be linked to terrorists, place them in jail, and hold them indefinitely, without due process. And, as has happened under Barack Obama, the President can order the assassination of American citizens, if it is determined such individuals are terrorists.

Chris Hedges speaks on the surveillance state

Hedges said that those who try to expose illegal behavior by the government are  “hunted down” and pay a heavy price. He pointed to Chelsea Manning, an Army officer who released military files to divulge war crimes by U.S. soldiers, and then was tried on espionage charges; and Snowden, who released classified files to reveal the unconstitutional NSA spying program, and then had to flee the country to avoid prosecution.

     “This is always the way totalitarian secret police forces work --- the SS, the KGB, the East German Stasi,” said Hedges. “Dissent is criminalized, truth is hidden.”

   As the laws were passed and court decisions handed down which enabled the surveillance state, Constitutional provisions such as the 4^th Amendment and its guarantee of privacy, have been shredded, Hedges said.

    Hedges said many people in the legal profession should have spoken up during this period of constitutional erosion, but did not.  “Where are the judges, the deans of law schools, the nation’s 1 million lawyers?” he asked.  “Why do they refuse to defend the Constitution? They have become valued partners, along with a bankrupt press, in a campaign to eradicate our most basic civil liberties.”

   While the  ‘war on terrorism’ and ‘national security’ are always cited as the reasons for the passage of the laws and judicial decisions curbing civil liberties, Hedges sees another reason behind the repression: corporate influence.  In these times of economic distress and widening inequality,  the elites in the corporate world fear potential unrest and seek control, Hedges said.  A mass surveillance system serves their interests.

            “Totalitarianism no longer comes through communism or fascism, it comes now from corporations,” Hedges said. “And these corporations fear those who think, write and speak out and those who form relationships freely. Individual freedom impedes their power and their profit.”

        Hedges, the author of a dozen books, including  “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,” “Empire of Illusion,” and “Death of the Liberal Class,” dismissed the idea that reform of our government and repealing anti-democratic laws will somehow come from elected officials like Obama or members of Congress.

  About the recent proposal by Obama to restrict NSA’s metadata collection, in the wake of Snowden’s revelations, Hedges said at first it seems good, “until you look at the details.”

  Then he said,  “I ask you, how many times does Barack Obama have to lie to you before you get it?”

     He said Obama had broken a number of pledges concerning civil liberties and constitutional matters, including the promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison; a pledge to revisit the Patriot Act; the promise to shut down our “black sites”; or the promise to reverse unconstitutional executive decisions by his predecessor, former President George Bush.

   “We got none of this. We got more untruths,” Hedges said.

 To restore our liberties, Hedges said,  the American people cannot look to government officials. “It means refusing to trust in their cosmetic reforms. Reforms will never come from those complicit in crimes.”

 In the end, it will be the people who will have to bring about change. “We can only save ourselves. We are the people we have been waiting for,” he said.

  “We must find, like Snowden, the physical and moral courage to tear down the structures that enslave us,” he said.

 

    

    .

   

  

Talking Tough on Russia

By Reginald Johnson

                      

               U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., insists he hasn’t done a flip-flop on his approach to foreign policy, with the hard-line stance he’s taken towards Russia in the current Ukraine crisis.

      Murphy won praise from progressives while he was in the House of Representatives for his opposition to the Iraq War and for his stand last year against military action in Syria following his election to the Senate.

      But now Murphy has endorsed a package of tough sanctions the Obama administration has set down to punish Russia, following that nation’s annexation of Crimea, a section of the Ukraine along the Black Sea where the Russian navy has its fleet. The Russians moved troops into Crimea following a coup d’etat in Ukraine, in which a pro-Russian leadership group was ousted by a pro-Western faction.

   The Connecticut lawmaker has traveled to Ukraine with conservative and hawkish Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, to investigate conditions in that nation and express support for the new government.

   “My position is not inconsistent. I am not an isolationist,” Murphy told about 60 people at a “Town Hall Meeting” in New Haven this week.

   Murphy said while he is “skeptical” of the U.S. ever getting involved militarily in Ukraine, he believes that penalties on Russia are essential, to send a message to Russian leader Vladimir Putin that territorial encroachment would not be tolerated.

   “You cannot allow a precedent to be set,” Murphy said, saying that if the west didn’t respond forcefully now, there will be more encroachments and more attempts “to reset borders” in the future.

   “This may not be the end. Kiev may be the target,” he said.

  Murphy got a respectful hearing at the meeting, which took place in the East Rock School. His remarks criticizing Russia drew applause several times from people in the audience, some of whom were Ukrainian-Americans. One man said there was a good bit of propaganda coming from the Russian side these days about the situation in Ukraine, similar to the propaganda put out in the old Soviet Union. He also questioned the validity of the referendum vote in Crimea recently, in which residents there voted overwhelmingly to join with Russia.

   But a number of other speakers criticized U.S. policy and challenged the senator on his stances. Stanley Heller of West Haven pointed out that a group of people in the new government were neo-fascists, from either the Svoboda Party or Right Sector. He said that he had seen a picture of Murphy standing with one of the more controversial figures.

   Murphy said a photo had been taken of him in a group shot “with about 50 people” and he was not fully aware at the time who was on the stage.

  Later, the senator said, he and others talked to the individual and expressed their deep concern about any fascistic or anti-semitic remarks, and indicated they were unacceptable.

   Richard Hill of New Haven  said that various factors are not being taken into account in understanding how Russia is concerned about developments in Ukraine. Hill spoke of the United States’ meddling in the politics of Ukraine, leading up to the coup.

   “Would we want that kind of meddling (by the Russians) going on in Canada or Mexico?” he asked.

  Hill also criticized the American press for failing to point out that Russia is concerned from a security standpoint with the expansion of NATO’s borders. Breaking a pledge made by American officials to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 ---- that NATO would not expand following the dissolution of the Soviet Union ---  NATO has gone ahead and expanded.  The Cold War organization formed in 1949 to defend western Europe from any possible Soviet aggression, has brought in new members from the old Soviet bloc, and NATO’s borders have moved further east towards Russia.

   Should Ukraine join, it would mean NATO would be lined up all along the Russian border.

    

    Others questioned whether America’s motives in Ukraine were really about building democracy as proclaimed, but instead about economic or other interests. Megan Iorio said the U.S. record of supporting dictatorships in Latin America, and failing to support democratic protests in places like Bahrain,  cast doubt on American pledges of wanting to build democracy in Ukraine.

  Some in the audience rebutted the claims about any anti-semitism going on now in Ukraine, or any discrimination against Jews being promoted by members of the new government. One woman said the “chief rabbi in Ukraine” said that Jewish life in Ukraine is “flourishing.”

   Murphy said he welcomed input from constitutents on Ukraine and other issues, and wants to hear different points of view. He said if people thought the senator would benefit from reading some article, they can send in the reference through his website.

   

Those Lying Russians

                                                    

By Reginald Johnson

Hey, did you hear? RT TV is biased!

It parrots the government line! Its Ukraine coverage is shameful!

Thank god we have a free, open and objective press here. Our reporters never kowtow to the government!

Remember the lead-up to the Iraq War, the press was tough and skeptical about Bush administration claims! None of the reporters swallowed hook, line and sinker claims about Iraqi WMDs! Thank goodness for that, because, because....

OK, a pause on the sarcasm. I want to say this. Russia Today--- which has been in the news this week due to two employees complaining about bias at the network ---  is in fact, slanted. It is funded by the Russian government; the stories often go easy on Vladimir Putin and government officials. But the network also produces some good stories which are well researched and present a perspective that’s tough to find here. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  I am tired of the self-righteous preachings of people in the U.S. media, about how RT is nothing but a propaganda machine, while the American press is some kind of paragon of virtue, bravely revealing all the vital news of the day, without fear or favor. What blather.

  Corporations that own newspapers and TV here often censor stories when corporate interests are threatened. Stories that should see the light of day do not. In other cases, the government --- yes, the government --- puts pressure on press outlets to kill stories, or hold stories, and the government usually gets its way. And finally, reporters often engage in self-censorship, when they avoid doing certain stories that might cast a negative light on public or private officials, because they don’t want to lose future access to sources and endanger their careers.

  Please, American media, enough of the sanctimony. And by the way, maybe it’s time to do a real story about what’s going on in the Ukraine. The coverage stinks. It seems a bit slanted to the side of the, uh, U.S. government. 

 

Fighting Back Against NSA Spying

                                            

By Reginald Johnson

        After a successful national protest earlier this month against the sweeping surveillance over Americans’ phone calls and email activity by the National Security Agency, it’s critical to keep up the pressure on Congress to rein in the spying programs.

    According to the website “The Day We Fight Back,” which promoted the Feb. 11 event of the same name, some 555,000 emails were sent to members of Congress urging them to rein in the NSA through reform legislation;  89,000 phone calls to Congress were made; some 301,000 people signed a petition demanding privacy as a human right; the website the daywefightback.org  was shared 420,000 times on Facebook; and more than 37 million people worldwide saw the “The Day We Fight Back” banner on the website the day of the protest.

  “Together we demonstrated that activists, organizations and companies can work in unison to fight mass surveillance and laid a foundation for escalation over the months to come,” said a statement on the website following the protest.

   The statement added that the fight still has a long ways to go. “To push back against surveillance, we need to keep acting to educate and urge our representatives to take action,” it said.

   The Feb. 11 protest was organized by a coalition of civil liberties organizations, digital rights groups, companies and activists who are determined to force the government to curtail the dragnet surveillance that was exposed last year by whisteblower Edward Snowden. The former contractor for the NSA released a trove of classified documents which showed that the NSA was tracking the phone records, email communications,  social network activity and web activity of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners.

  Billions of records of phone calling “metadata” --- showing who made a call, to whom, how long the call was, and the location of those taking part ---- are being swept up by the government.

  According to The Washington Post, one of the papers which published the revelations made by Snowden, the NSA is also harvesting both the metadata and content of emails, web activity, social networks and chats, as part of what the agency calls “upstream collection.”

   The government claims that the NSA surveillance is both constitutional and a necessary tool in fighting terrorism.

  But civil liberties advocates claim that the NSA spying program is a clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantees of the right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association.

   The American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of the coalition fighting the NSA surveillance, says that the agency’s “aggregation of metadata constitutes an invasion of privacy and an unreasonable search” and is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. Also, the phone tracking program violates the First Amendment “because it vacuums up sensitive information on associational and expressive activity.”

  The ACLU is suing the government to end the spying program and have all the collected data deleted.

  According to Josh Levy, of the internet rights group Free Press, the NSA surveillance programs “attack our basic rights to connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself. Only a broad movement of activists, organizations and companies can convince Washington to restore these rights.”

    During the “Day We Fight Back” protest, people either calling or emailing their representatives in Congress were urged to tell them to support the USA Freedom Act, which would end the bulk collection of phone data by the government and make the deliberations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) --- which authorizes NSA surveillance programs --- more transparent.

   Another bill is going through Congress, offered by U.S. Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., relating to the NSA. However, the bill, though offering some cosmetic reforms in the FISA process, would largely keep in place the existing NSA surveillance programs.

   Several members of the Connecticut congressional delegation were called by this reporter in the “Day We Fight Back” protest. A staff member for U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, said the congressman was still weighing whether to support the USA Freedom Act. A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy also said the senator hadn’t taken a position on the bill yet.

  The position of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., was clear, however. Blumenthal is a co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, a staffer said.

   Activists see an urgency in rolling back the legal authority for the spying programs, as more and more revelations keep coming out about how extensive the government surveillance is, both in the United States and abroad.

  Recently The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that the British spy agency GCHQ, with aid from the NSA, had intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing.

  

   

                  

Pete Seeger, 1919-2014

      

       R.I.P. Pete Seeger.

       Seeger, who died Monday at the age of 94, was an incredible human being. Even though he was well into his 90s, and very frail, it seemed like Pete would go on forever. He sang and fought for justice right up to the end. I remember him singing on a cold night two years ago at an impromptu gathering in Manhattan during the Occupy movement. I was lucky enough to see him in person at the Tanglewood music festival in 1989 in a concert with Arlo Guthrie. I also cherish an old LP I have of the Weavers, the wonderful folk group Pete was a part of in the 1950s.

  Aside from being a great artist, Seeger was a person of very high principle. I read today that he had refused to "name names" when hauled before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, which was investigating "communist subversion" in the McCarthy era. For that, he won a contempt of Congress conviction and was blacklisted, along with the other Weavers, by the commercial media. It would have been much more lucrative for Seeger to have just gone along with the witchhunt and given the committee what they wanted. But he was better than that.

What a life lived. He'll be so missed.

Nov. 22, 1963: A Turning Point for America

By Reginald Johnson

                For a long time, I  believed 9-11 was worst thing that ever happened to the United States.

    It was awful. Nearly 3,000 people killed in those terror attacks and so many families left grief-stricken.

    And 9-11 set the stage for the brutal (and in one case misguided) wars that followed, in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

          But in the last few weeks, I’ve changed my mind.  When I saw the 50^th anniversary shows on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and saw the old footage, it all came back. As bad as Sept. 11 was, I don’t think anything shook this country as much as the death of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t seem like this country has ever been the same since that day.

     I’ve heard phrases thrown around recently to describe the meaning of that day: “The day we lost our innocence,”  and another, (the title of a blog by Ira Chernus) “The day truth died.”  These are both right. It was such a shattering event.

    Maybe it’s because I was a naive 16-year-old private school student when this happened. Very idealistic, and, like a lot of  people my age at the time, a great fan of JFK. Here was this dashing young president who was both bright and witty and inspiring. He seemed to say and do all the right things: urging young people to get involved,  helping their country and the world with efforts like the Peace Corps; working to help the movement for integration; backing legislation that would eventually become Medicare; signing the nuclear test ban treaty; promoting the space program and sending men into space.

   In those days, we were in a Cold War with Russia, and we were proud when Kennedy stood up to the Soviets over the placement of missiles in Cuba and spoke out for freedom while visiting the Berlin Wall.

   And he came to be president  at a time when the country was booming economically and was the most admired country in the world. Our standard of living was tops and there were plenty of jobs --- particularly manufacturing jobs.

   It seemed like America and our young president could do no wrong.

   It was in that cocoon of innocence that I returned from lunch on Nov. 22, set to go to another class, when I overheard someone say, ‘Kennedy was shot.’   Feeling stunned, I rushed over to this small building where students could socialize and smoke cigarettes. Some of my friends were there listening to the radio. I lit up a cigarette as  the news came over. Minutes later, there was silence. Then a somber voice announced, ‘The president is dead.’ The Star Spangled Banner began playing. I couldn’t believe it.  Just total disbelief.  I was also pissed. I threw down my cigarette, stomped on it and left. I didn’t want to talk with anyone.

   The next several days, I was glum and kept to myself. I missed the 24-7 television coverage, missed Oswald getting shot, missed new President Lyndon Johnson’s announcements and much of Kennedy’s funeral. How could this happen here? The United States?  It took months for me to get over the shock.

 I was able to get over it in part because I was reassured by Johnson’s statements and actions. He pledged to follow the Kennedy program, particularly with civil rights. When the following fall came around, Johnson seemed downright saintly compared to the crackpot Republican candidate for president that year, Barry Goldwater, who had talked about dropping an atomic bomb on Vietnam!  Johnson, meanwhile, said he would not send U.S. troops to Vietnam. Seemed like a good guy.

  But within months, it was clear Johnson was lying. In early ’65,  the U.S. had started bombing North Vietnam. By the spring, the first troops were sent. Within a few years, we had hundreds of thousands of troops there, all in the name of “stopping communism.” Many of our soldiers died. But many, many more Vietnamese died. We pulverized that country with bombing and poisoned it with napalm and Agent Orange. When all was said and done, we had lost 55,000 people; the Vietnamese had lost 3 million.

   And during the Vietnam era, a lot of ugly divisions in our society began to surface, between hawks and doves, liberals and conservatives, hippies and hard hats, religious versus non-religious. A lot of that divisiveness is still out there today.

  After Johnson, we got the corruption of Richard Nixon and Watergate.  A few years later, the downward curve continued with the coming of Ronald Reagan, and his backwards notion that “government is the problem.”  Reagan began the process of chipping away at the safety net and the New Deal, and undermining unions --- more trends we’re still dealing with today.

  More recently we’ve had George W. Bush and his disastrous war on Iraq and two vacillating small ‘d’  democrat presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Their vision of government is almost as limited as the Republicans.

   Maybe I am idealizing the Kennedy years, but things were better then. Since that period there’s been progress only in few areas. Women’s rights are certainly better today than they were in the early ‘60s. Legal and political rights for blacks are better, though the economic struggle for most blacks still goes on.

  But what else? Our middle class has sunk, quality jobs have evaporated, and our nation is constantly at war.

  I think if Jack Kennedy lived, I think the late 1960s would have been better, and that would have provided a good foundation for the future. It is a fact that he signed a memorandum a month before he died that he intended to pull all U.S. advisors out of Vietnam by 1965. Supposing there had been no Vietnam War? And supposing Kennedy had followed up on feelers to bring a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, and end the insane arms race?

   It should be said Kennedy had his failings, and there are certainly a lot of skeptics out there who downplay what he would have done if he had lived. He was a philanderer and dishonest to his wife; though publicly pushing integration he was friendly with southern segregationists for political purposes; and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 was a boneheaded move.

   But I believe if Kennedy had lived, there would have been no Vietnam War, and he would have achieved lot at home, in the end compiling a domestic record that would have rivaled FDR’s.

   I think it’s definitely fair to say if JFK, his brother Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King had lived, America would be a much better place today.

******************************************************************************  

I’ve always felt there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.  Lee Harvey Oswald may well have been part of it, but he did not act alone. Too many people heard too many shots that day in Dallas, and eyewitnesses saw some shots come from the front of Kennedy’s motorcade, something the Warren Commission denied happening. (The Warren Commission, charged with investigating the assassination, concluded Oswald acted alone, and shot Kennedy from the rear, firing a rifle from a 6^th-floor window).

 While Kennedy was quite popular in general,  he was hated by some, including right-wingers and anti-Castro Cubans. He also had a lot of detractors in the military and the intelligence agencies, who thought Kennedy was ‘too soft on communism.’  I believe people from the intelligence sector and the military, as well as some anti-communist Cubans, were part of the conspiracy. Oswald was on the fringes. Jack Ruby was sent to shut Oswald up. The fact that Ruby, a nobody, could waltz into the Dallas police station while the most important criminal suspect in American history was being transported, then walk up and shoot Oswald dead, tells you all you need to know about this case. It’s been a total cover-up.

Demanding Action on Fukushima

                                          

 By Reginald Johnson

                                

    A determined group of anti-nuclear activists are working feverishly to spread the word about the grave dangers posed by the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, and demanding that other countries get involved in making sure that the plant doesn’t have a catastrophic nuclear accident.

  Recently the group delivered a petition to the United Nations with over 150,000 signatures which asks that UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other world leaders take immediate steps to intervene in the Fukushima situation, by sending a team of elite scientists and engineers to Japan to oversee the safe dismantling of the plant.

  The company that owns the facility, Tokyo Electric Power Company, on Monday began the removal of 1300 highly radioactive fuel rods from an unstable storage building at Reactor 4.  The work is expected to last a year.

 But activists such as long-time nuclear power critic Harvey Wasserman maintain that TEPCO does not have the expertise to handle this operation properly, and there’s the possibility of a major accident.

  Wasserman and others say the fuel rods (now in a cooling pool) are in some cases bent or embrittled, and the removal will be extremely tricky. Should any of the rods break, hit each other, or get exposed to the air, there could be an explosion and serious radiation releases.

   The amount of radiation that could potentially be released if all the rods were caught up in an explosion is 14,000 times the amount contained in the fallout from the Hiroshima bomb, according to Hiroaki  Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.

   Charles Perrow, a professor at Yale University said the amount of radioactive caesium - 137 in the spent fuel pool is 10 times the amount that was present in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986. Radiation from the Chernobyl meltdown spread around the world. At Fukushima, one slip-up in the removal process would trigger a chain reaction, Perrow told ABC News.

  “This has me very scared,” he said. “Tokyo would have to be evacuated because caesium and other poisons that are there will spread very rapidly.”

   At a gathering Nov. 7 at Dag Hammerskjold Plaza outside the UN prior to the delivery of the petition and accompanying letter, Wasserman and other activists spoke about their work and the Fukushima crisis. A number of those present were members of  the group the “Green Shadow Cabinet,” an alternative presidential cabinet whose members often speak in opposition to government policies and offer progressive alternatives.

  “The letter we’re delivering promotes a plan developed by 16 top nuclear experts urging that the government of Japan transfer responsibility for the Fukushima reactor site to a worldwide engineering group….this plan stresses that the clean-up be overseen by a civil society panel and an international group of nuclear experts independent from TEPCO and the International Atomic Energy Admnistration (IAEA),” Wasserman said.

  Also speaking was Dr. Margaret Flowers,  a pediatrician and another member of the Green Shadow Cabinet.  “There is the potential for a massive release of radiation that would have significant health effects for people and other life across the world --- from Japan to the Pacific Islands to the continental United States, “ she said.

  Flowers added,  “The U.S. government and many regulatory bodies are dominated by the nuclear industry and have failed to take appropriate action to provide assistance to Japan. We can’t cross our fingers and hope that TEPCO pulls it off,”

 

  Also on hand was Dr. Jill Stein, the president of the Green Shadow Cabinet and Green Party presidential candidate in the 2012 national election.

 Stein spoke about the need for transparency in the information coming out about Fukushima and the clean-up operation --- also known as decommissioning.

  “The media must be provided with timely, accurate information and must report on Fukushima throughout this critical phase. The public needs to know what’s going on, step by step,” said Stein.

  The problem with the Reactor 4 spent fuel rods is by no means the only issue of concern at Fukushima Daiichi, which was struck by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. The natural disaster caused over 18,000 deaths.

   Three entire reactor cores are missing since the earthquake; massive amounts of radiated water has leaked from the plant into the Pacific Ocean, contaminating sea life; thousands more radioactive spent fuel rods lie in storage buildings around the facility, creating additional health risks in the event of another earthquake.

 

    The activists will continue to agitate to get the word out about the dangers posed by Fukushima and the need for a proper clean-up. More petition drives and actions are planned.

    Wasserman said he and others also will engage in a fast on the 11^th day of every month, “to honor the victims of this horrible disaster, and to focus our efforts on finding ways to survive it.”