Aquifer at Risk: Florida Gas Drilling Developments and Legislation

The Floridian Aquifer: Connectivity,
Permeability, and Vulnerability

Florida Gas Drilling Developments and Legislation
July 18, 2013 | Samir Lakhani, GIS Intern, FracTracker Alliance

There have been a significant number of enquiries regarding the status of hydraulic fracturing activity in Florida, enough of which garner a FracTracker post. The short answer is that there is minimal drilling activity occurring in Florida—but not for long. It was only a matter of time until gas companies set their gaze on Florida, and her abundance of energy resources. Preparations to drill are already underway. Permits have been filed, equipment is being shipped, and exploratory drilling will begin any minute now. What makes Florida drilling ominous is the real risk for chemical leakage and groundwater contamination.
Imagine this:

It is just another sunny day in sunny Florida, but on this quiet day, two men ring your doorbell. You answer, of course, and find out that these men are from Total Safety, Inc., a company contracted by the independent oil company Dan A. Hughes Company, from Beeville, Texas. They ask you to provide your contact information and any other emergency contact info, just in case disaster strikes at the drill site operating barely 1000 feet from your house. For most of the citizens of Naples, Florida, this is the first they have ever heard of drilling, in their neighborhood. The citizens of Naples, Florida received quite a scare that day. The outrage in the community was so abundant and uniform that these families decided to act out against this development to preserve their piece of paradise. Read More

What makes drilling in Florida so precarious is that porous limestone shelves make up the majority of rock underlying permitted well sites. If any accident were to happen, the leakage of waste and chemicals would be virtually impossible to contain. It then would seep directly into the Florida aquifer which lies beneath the entirety of the state and large sections of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Maintaining water quality for the Floridan Aquifer is non-negotiable, since it is the primary water source for Savannah, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Orlando, Gainesville, Tampa, and others. An attempt to clean the aquifer thoroughly would be impossible, and not to mention, prohibitively expensive. Another troubling thought is possible contamination and degradation of the beloved Florida Everglades.

Florida is an interesting case right now; the gas game is still very young. Florida lawmakers have an opportunity to draft real preventative measures, rather than legislation after the fact. Hydraulic fracturing is no new phenomenon, and Florida politicians have the prospect of learning from other states, incorporating relevant ideas and taking their own stance on this issue. Currently, a couple of bills are slowly trudging through the state legislature. The idea is to require a list of chemical disclosures from all active gas drilling companies. Environmentalists claim this bill is a sham, for the companies need to list the chemicals used in drilling, but not the quantities of each. It may be just another half-hearted attempt to show real political action, while retaining a good business relationship with drilling companies. It is unlikely more stringent policies will be successful, however, given that some powers currently in office believe climate change to be a fairy tale.

25 Facts About The Fall Of Detroit That Will Leave You Shaking Your Head

25 Facts About The Fall Of Detroit That Will Leave You Shaking Your Head
July 20, 2013 | ECB | Michael Synder

It is so sad to watch one of America's greatest cities die a horrible death.  Once upon a time, the city of Detroit was a teeming metropolis of 1.8 million people and it had the highest per capita income in the United States.  Now it is a rotting, decaying hellhole of about 700,000 people that the rest of the world makes jokes about.  On Thursday, we learned that the decision had been made for the city of Detroit to formally file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy.  It was going to be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States by far, but on Friday it was stopped at least temporarily by an Ingham County judge.  She ruled that Detroit's bankruptcy filing violates the Michigan Constitution because it would result in reduced pension payments for retired workers.  She also stated that Detroit's bankruptcy filing was "also not honoring the (United States) president, who took (Detroit’s auto companies) out of bankruptcy", and she ordered that a copy of her judgment be sent to Barack Obama.  How "honoring the president" has anything to do with the bankruptcy of Detroit is a bit of a mystery, but what that judge has done is ensured that there will be months of legal wrangling ahead over Detroit's money woes.  It will be very interesting to see how all of this plays out.  But one thing is for sure - the city of Detroit is flat broke.  One of the greatest cities in the history of the world is just a shell of its former self.  The following are 25 facts about the fall of Detroit that will leave you shaking your head...

1) At this point, the city of Detroit owes money to more than 100,000 creditors.

2) Detroit is facing $20 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities.  That breaks down to more than $25,000 per resident.

3) Back in 1960, the city of Detroit actually had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation.

4) In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit.  Today, there are less than 27,000.

5) Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.

6) There are lots of houses available for sale in Detroit right now for $500 or less.

7) At this point, there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.

8) About one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

9) An astounding 47 percent of the residents of the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate.

10) Less than half of the residents of Detroit over the age of 16 are working at this point.

11) If you can believe it, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

12) Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but over the past 60 years the population of Detroit has fallen by 63 percent.

13) The city of Detroit is now very heavily dependent on the tax revenue it pulls in from the casinos in the city.  Right now, Detroit is bringing in about 11 million dollars a month in tax revenue from the casinos.

14) There are 70 "Superfund" hazardous waste sites in Detroit.

15) 40 percent of the street lights do not work.

16) Only about a third of the ambulances are running.

17) Some ambulances in the city of Detroit have been used for so long that they have more than 250,000 miles on them.

18) Two-thirds of the parks in the city of Detroit have been permanently closed down since 2008.

19) The size of the police force in Detroit has been cut by about 40 percent over the past decade.

20) When you call the police in Detroit, it takes them an average of 58 minutes to respond.

21) Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.

22) The violent crime rate in Detroit is five times higher than the national average.

23) The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.

24) Today, police solve less than 10 percent of the crimes that are committed in Detroit.

25) Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are telling people to "enter Detroit at your own risk".

It is easy to point fingers and mock Detroit, but the truth is that the rest of America is going down the exact same path that Detroit has gone down.

Detroit just got there first.

All over this country, there are hundreds of state and local governments that are also on the verge of financial ruin...

"Everyone will say, 'Oh well, it's Detroit. I thought it was already in bankruptcy,' " said Michigan State University economist Eric Scorsone. "But Detroit is not unique. It's the same in Chicago and New York and San Diego and San Jose. It's a lot of major cities in this country. They may not be as extreme as Detroit, but a lot of them face the same problems."

A while back, Meredith Whitney was highly criticized for predicting that there would be a huge wave of municipal defaults in this country.  When it didn't happen, the critics let her have it mercilessly.

But Meredith Whitney was not wrong.

She was just early.

Detroit is only just the beginning.  When the next major financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a wave of municipal bankruptcies unlike anything we have ever seen before.

And of course the biggest debt problem of all in this country is the U.S. government.  We are going to pay a great price for piling up nearly 17 trillion dollars of debt and over 200 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.

All over the nation, our economic infrastructure is being gutted, debt levels are exploding and poverty is spreading.  We are consuming far more wealth than we are producing, and our share of global GDP has been declining dramatically.

We have been living way above our means for so long that we think it is "normal", but an extremely painful "adjustment" is coming and most Americans are not going to know how to handle it.

So don't laugh at Detroit.  The economic pain that Detroit is experiencing will be coming to your area of the country soon enough.

Sunspots and the great cooling ahead

SOTT: Sunspots and the great cooling ahead
July 18, 2013 | Jeffrey Folks | American Thinker

Presumably, even among the ill-informed ideologues at the White House, there are a few who have heard of sunspots. There may even be one who knows, as most informed persons do, of the correlation between sunspot activity and the earth's climate. But apparently no one has bothered to inform the president.

When sunspot activity is high, as it was during the 1990s and early 2000s, temperatures tend to be high as well. When it is low, as it is now, temperatures fall. And because sunspot activity occurs in decades-long cycles, the unusually cold winter and spring of 2012 may be just the beginning. As a Barron's article recently noted, current sunspot activity is now the least it has been in a century.

What this means is that the era of global cooling has begun. In the northern hemisphere, three out of the four last winters and springs have been unusually cold. This spring was so cold in East Asia that China was forced to import millions of tons of grain and soybeans from the U.S. and other suppliers.

The environmental elitists in Manhattan and Laguna Beach may not be greatly inconvenienced by cold winters, but ordinary people have to eat, too, and food exhausts a much greater share of their income. For the world's poor, a cold year means the difference between eating and going hungry, or between heating one's home and shivering all winter. Or as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it (while living through the thick of the Little Ice Age himself), it's the difference between a life that is warm and comfortable and one that is "nasty, brutish, and short." Because climate alarmists are focused on global warming when they should be concerned with cooling, life for the world's poor is likely to be just that.

That is because shortages inevitably result from global cooling. As supplies of foodstuffs and energy become constrained due to cold, damp growing seasons and the need for more heating, a global bidding war arises in which the poor lose out. The environmental elitists will not suffer -- they'll pay more as they roll their overladen buggies out of the local Costco, but what the heck? They can bask in the illusion that they are saving the earth.

But the poor in Mexico and India and here in American will suffer as their lives are shortened by malnutrition and disease. With astounding arrogance, President Obama in his latest budget promises tens of billions more to fund clean energy scams for his billionaire buddies. But has he ever considered, even for one moment, the suffering he has inflicted on the poor by distorting global food and energy markets?

Every year, nearly half of the U.S. corn crop goes up in smoke, burned as corn ethanol, while children in Guatemala lie listlessly in the dust, their bellies swollen with starvation. The president is not there at their side, either literally or figuratively. He is too busy playing golf or vacationing at the billionaire beach houses on Martha's Vineyard or Oahu.

There will be more hungry children once global cooling arrives in earnest. Ocean currents and other influences on the climate undergo natural periods of alteration. Inevitably, natural forces such as those which have increased global temperatures over previous decades will shift from warming to cooling. When this natural alteration coincides with decreased sunspot activity, as is happening at present, the result is extreme cooling. And history has shown that periods of global cooling last for decades, if not for centuries.

While these facts are well known to climatologists, the White House continues to pretend ignorance. Indeed, two weeks ago, the president unveiled a major initiative designed to cool the planet at the very moment when the planet is cooling all on its own. It is fortunate that this foolish plan to lower temperatures by reducing carbon emissions will not work. U.S. carbon emissions are now at the lowest point since 1992, and yet Obama says temperatures have been rising. So how, exactly, has the lowering of U.S. carbon emissions changed the climate?

Just because the president's climate initiative will not work, however, this does not mean that it is harmless. It will continue to harm the world's poor, and every other consumer, by raising the prices of food and fuel. And it will divert capital from the private sector, where it would create prosperity and thus leave us better prepared to face whatever climate issues lie ahead.

As Bjorn Lomborg argues in Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, government spending designed to control the climate would be better spent on real issues of hunger and disease. Or, I would argue, those funds would be best left in the hands of taxpayers. Most taxpayers would invest in businesses that produce jobs and increase prosperity -- including among the world's poor. And most would also donate to churches and charities that make the world a better place for all. But when that money is squandered on Solyndra, it can never be invested, never produce profits, and never rescue the world's poor. Instead, it goes into the pockets of Obama's billionaire buddies.

What America is facing with global cooling is year after year of crop failure, higher heating bills, and general inflation (as the effects of higher food and fuel prices ripple through the economy). The best way to prepare for this crisis is to unleash the powerful forces of the free market, thus creating prosperity for all and putting our nation in the position to prosper no matter what.

Instead of preparing for the climate crisis ahead, Obama kowtows to coastal environmentalists in return for donations. In doing so, he shows a complete lack of concern for the poor in this country and abroad -- those who will suffer the most in the bidding war for food and energy once the effects of the Great Cooling are felt. As the climate cools, hundreds of millions in America and abroad will lack the resources to feed themselves or heat their homes.

By then, of course, Obama will already have left office and will presumably be sunning himself on some balmy Hawaiian beach. He will not have to suffer from the effects of his policies, but those who do should not forget that it was this president who squandered our chances of preparing for the Great Cooling. More than anything, Obama's legacy may be that he was the fool who believed, or pretended to believe, that closing a few power plants would cool the planet just when the planet was already in the process of cooling. He is the one who looked in the rearview mirror and prepared for global warming just as he was about to crash head-on into the exact opposite.

UK Government Unveils World's 'Most Generous' Tax Breaks for Fracking

A fracking protest in Lancashire.
(Photo: JustinWoolford/cc/flickr)

UK Government Unveils World's 'Most Generous' Tax Breaks for Fracking
July 20, 2013 | Common Dreams | Andrea Germanos

Environmental groups slam "tax hand-outs to polluting energy firms that threaten our communities and environment"

The British government unveiled the world's "most generous" tax breaks for fracking on Friday, hoping it can "be a leader of the shale gas revolution."

 "Shale gas is a resource with huge potential to broaden the UK’s energy mix," stated Chancellor George Osborne, head of the treasury.  "We want to create the right conditions for industry to explore and unlock that potential in a way that allows communities to share in the benefits. This new tax regime, which I want to make the most generous for shale in the world, will contribute to that."

"I want Britain to be a leader of the shale gas revolution – because it has the potential to create thousands of jobs and keep energy bills low for millions of people," continued Osborne.

Fracked gas has yet to be produced in the UK, though exploratory drills are underway.

The new tax rate would chop the current rate in half, as "shale gas producers will pay just 30 per cent tax on their profits, compared to the 62 per cent that the oil and gas industry has traditionally paid," the Independent reports.

The UK's Friends of the Earth's Head of Campaigns, Andrew Pendleton, said in a statement that

Promising tax hand-outs to polluting energy firms that threaten our communities and environment, when everyone else is being told to tighten their belts, is a disgrace.

Ministers should be encouraging investors to develop the nation's huge renewable energy potential. This would create tens of thousands of jobs and wean the nation off its increasingly expensive fossil fuel dependency.

And Lawrence Carter, an energy campaigner for Greenpeace, noted in an op-ed on Friday:

The International Energy Agency has described how “huge subsidies and tax breaks are tilting the global energy market in favour of fossil fuels” and have labelled them “public enemy number one for green energy”.

Today’s announcement just tilted that balance even further.

On Thursday, a day before Osborne's announcement, Caroline Lucas, UK's only Green MP, took part in a debate on fracking with MPs and said:

It's clear that ministers and fracking firms – increasingly indistinguishable – are keen to press on rapidly.

The direct carbon content of shale gas means widespread use [of it] is incompatible with the climate change targets of the UK. Shale gas is a high-carbon fuel.

The Sun-Earth Connection | Space News

The Sun-Earth Connection | Space News
July 20, 2013 | ThunderboltsProject

Our reporter Cameron Mercer continues his interview with Steve Smith, managing editor of the Thunderbolts Picture of the Day. The Earth-Sun connection, as part of the electrified heliosphere, makes clear that the Sun will never be properly understood apart from the electric currents through which planets and their satellites continually move.

Mayan Discovery: Ancient Monument Reveals Royal Struggle

The Maya Snake queen Lady Ikoom was described
on an nearly 1500-year-old stone monument
unearthed at the Mayan city of El Peru.
Credit: hoto by Francico Castaneda; courtesy of
Proyecto Arqueológico El Perú-Waka´y PACUNAM

Mayan Discovery: Ancient Monument Reveals Royal Struggle
July 19, 2013 | Live Science | Tia Ghose

A nearly 1,500-year-old Mayan stone monument, inscribed with a story of an ancient power struggle, has been unearthed in Guatemala.

The stone slab, which dates to A.D. 564, was found in a small tunnel that adjoins the tomb of an ancient queen beneath the Mayan temple at the site of El Perú-Waka'.

The slab, almost 6 feet (2 meters) high and 3 feet (1 m) wide, is carved with the image of a large man in its center, and is inscribed with Mayan hieroglyphics. The text on the monument describes a tumultuous seven-year period when two dynasties battled for rule of the ancient kingdom.

Prior to discovering this monument, no one knew the names of Mayan rulers during the sixth century.

"It really does advance our knowledge of the history of this royal family and dynasty," said study co-author David Friedel, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Ancient empire

The Mayan empire flourished in southern Mexico and parts of Guatemala for about six centuries, then mysteriously collapsed around A.D. 900. The Mayans built the massive city of Tikal, developed a hieroglyphic writing system and their own calendar, which infamously predicted the world would end in 2012.

However, because they usually wrote on paper, rather than stone, "most of their writing is gone," Friedel told LiveScience.

Earlier this year, Friedel and his colleagues were excavating the Mayan tomb of a royal woman named Lady K'abel, when they uncovered the massive stone stele. Carved into the stele was the outline of a man cradling a sacred bundle in his arms, and there were inscriptions describing his feats on the sides of the monument.

Though the stone was worn away in the center, the inscriptions on the side remained readable. [Photos: First Glimpse into a Mayan Tomb]

These hieroglyphs describe the conjuring of the three city gods
by the Maya King Chak Took Ich'aak.
Credit: hoto by Francico Castaneda; courtesy of Proyecto
Arqueológico El Perú-Waka´y PACUNAM

Tumultuous period

The team deciphered the inscriptions to reveal that a king known as King Wa'oom Uch'ab Tzi'kin, or He Who Stands Up the Offering of the Eagle, likely dedicated the stele to his father, King Chak Took Ich'aak, or Red Spark Claw, in 564. Both names were lost to history until now.

Because the Mayan calendar date was written on the slab, the team knows the exact day on which it was dedicated.

The inscription reveals that the death of the father, King Chak Took Ich'aak, in A.D. 556 ushered in a period of political turmoil as different groups grappled for supremacy.  His son ultimately took the throne.

The stele also describes a royal woman, Lady Ikoom, who was a holy person and probably the mother of the king who dedicated the stele.

The team hypothesizes that the stele is so worn because it was exposed to elements aboveground for over a century before being brought into the tomb in A.D. 702.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Banking on Influence With Bank of America

Banking on Influence With Bank of America
July 19, 2013 | BLN | Andrew Gavin Marshall

This July, Bank of America was expecting to report an earnings increase of 32% from last year. The Washington Business Journal declared the bank among the top 10 “most improved brands” of the year. Bank of America is the second-largest bank in the United States following JPMorgan Chase.

So why does this bank deserve such an “improved” reputation? Perhaps it’s worth looking at a little of the bank’s record for some clarity.

During the first year of the global financial crisis, which the big banks helped to create and which they profited enormously from, the government stepped in to bail out Bank of America. They rewarded the bank $20 billion for its massive financial crimes, as well as a special guarantee for nearly $100 billion of potential losses on the balance sheets of Merrill Lynch, which Bank of America acquired during the crisis.

As it turns out, Bank of America and other big banks continue to get “backdoor bailouts” through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which acts as a legal guarantor and protector of the Wall Street chain gang of criminal conglomerates. The bank was recently added to a list, compiled by a corporate watchdog group, of the “dirty dozen” criminal financial institutions for its role deceiving investors, committing mortgage and foreclosure abuses and engaging in municipal bond rigging and illegal payments.

When Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone that Bank of America was “a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time,” he wasn’t exaggerating. The bank foreclosed on tens of thousands of Americans through a “mass perjury” scheme and pushed worthless mortgages on pension funds and unions. As several big banks – including BofA, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Citigroup – agreed to pay a $25 billion settlement with the government over “abusive mortgage practices,” the Department of Justice granted the banks what amounted to legal immunity “from civil government claims over faulty foreclosures.” In January, Bank of America settled to pay $11.6 billion to the government-controlled mortgage company Fannie Mae in response to a legal battle over “bad loans.”

In June of 2013, six former BofA employees and one contractor issued sworn statements in which they accused the bank of lying to homeowners, fraudulently denying loan modifications and paying bonuses to staff who pushed people into foreclosure. One of the whistleblowers commented, “we were told to lie to customers.” Employees that pushed ten or more homeowners per month into foreclosure would receive a $500 bonus, and the Bank also “gave employees gift cards to retail stores like Target or Bed Bath and Beyond as rewards for placing accounts into foreclosure.”

Further, anyone who “questioned the ethics” of the bank’s practices was summarily fired – a policy that led to a lawsuit in which homeowners accused the bank of racketeering “to defraud homeowners who sought modifications and then acted as the kingpin of that [racketeering] enterprise.”

Of course, it doesn’t end there. Bank of America, along with multiple other big banks, has been accused of laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. The FBI confirmed that BofA was involved in laundering drug money for the Los Zetas drug cartel in Mexico. However, in a twist of fine news for the bank, U.S. government regulators indicated they would not hold the bank responsible for its actions.

Banking on Influence

So how does a massive criminal enterprise engaging in large-scale fraud, racketeering and money laundering get a free pass from the U.S. government? The bank’s financial clout in the economy certainly plays a part. But so too do its affiliations with dominant national and international organizations, institutionalizing the bank within the larger global power structures and the elites who run them.

Research conducted for the Global Power Project found 28 individuals at Bank of America, including executives and members of board of directors, with institutional affiliations. Four of the individuals who hold leadership positions at BofA are also affiliated with the major foreign-policy think tank in the United States: the Council on Foreign Relations. Three individuals are connected to Morgan Stanley, another major financial institution, while two affiliations exist with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (promoting big business “solutions” to environmental crises), the Business Council, Catalyst, Duke University, Stanford University, and BlackRock.

The following institutions each also hold one individual affiliated with Bank of America: Royal Dutch Shell, DuPont, Deere & Company, the World Wildlife Fund, the President’s Export Council, Harvard, the World Economic Forum, Brookings Institution, Sara Lee Corporation, Monsanto, CBS Corporation, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Walt Disney Company, President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the Rockefeller Foundation, Business Roundtable, Financial Services Forum, PepsiCo, Carlyle Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, Goldman Sachs, the International Advisory Panel of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait.

Meet the Elites

Bank of America’s CEO, Brian T. Moynihan, was a former executive vice president at Fleet Boston and director of BlackRock. He is currently a member of the Business Roundtable and Vice Chairman of the Financial Services Forum, as well as being a member of the International Advisory Panel of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Charles O. Holliday, Jr. is the Chairman of the Board of Bank of America and a director of Royal Dutch Shell, and was the CEO of DuPont from 1998 to 2009. He was the former Chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the Business Council, Catalyst, the Society of Chemical Industry, and is a founding member of the International Business Council. Holliday is a director of Deere & Company, a member of the board of Planet Forward, Climate Works Foundation, the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, and is a member of the board of directors of the National Geographic Education Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Mukesh D. Ambani is a member of the board of Bank of America and is the Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries. He is a member of the Global Board of Advisors of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry for the Government of India, a member of the board of governors of the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi, and a member of the Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group. Ambani is also a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, a member of the Indo-U.S. CEOs Forum, a member of the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait, Vice Chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and a member of the Advisory Council of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Additionally Ambani is a member of the Business Council, the India-Russia CEO Council, Co-Chair of the Japan-India Business Leader’s Forum, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, and is a member of the International Advisory Council of the Brookings Institution.

Monica C. Lozano is Chairman and CEO of ImpreMedia and CEO of La Opinion, as well as a member of the board of directors of the Walt Disney Company. She is also a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, a Trustee of the University of Southern California and a director of the Weingart Foundation, as well as a member of the board of directors of the Commission of the 21st Century Economy. Lozano was a member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board from 2009-2011, and has since been a member of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness as well as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Charles O. Rossotti is a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group and was the Commissioner of the IRS from 1997 to 2002, also sitting on the board of directors of Booz Allen Hamilton, Quorum Management Solutions, Primatics Financial and AES Corporation. He too is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Linda P. Hudson, who sits on the board of BofA, is the President and CEO of the military contractor BAE Systems, and former Vice President of General Dynamics. Hudson sits on the board of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and on the executive committee of the Aerospace Industries Association. She is a member of the University of Florida Foundation Board and the International Women’s Forum.

Anne M. Finucance, who is the Global Strategy and Marketing Officer at Bank of America, is also a director of Partners HealthCare System, CVS Caremark Corporation, a trustee of Stonehill College and Carnegie Hall, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Finucance sits on the boards of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the American Ireland Fund, the International Center of Journalists, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

Banking on America?

Bank of America is, in short, a profound symbol of much that is wrong on Wall Street: massive fraud, money laundering, racketeering, conspiracy, and weighty influence in Washington and beyond. Surely it’s comforting to know that a woman who sits on the board of BofA, Monica Lozano, also sits on President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, advising the president as to how to appropriately manage the economic “recovery”. In terms of the media reporting on Bank of America’s crimes, Lozano, as CEO of a media company and board member of the Walt Disney Company, along with BofA board member Charles K. Gifford — who sits on the board of directors of CBS Corporation — signal that a “fair” portrayal of the bank’s activities aren’t exactly what the public should expect.

What is clear is that Bank of America, like all big banks in our era, isn’t merely a financial institution but simultaneously acts as an influential institution in the media, military industrial complex, think tanks, chemical companies and government circles.

The bank is too big to fail. Too big to jail. And too connected to change.

Andrew Gavin Marshall, BFP Partner Producer, contributing author and analyst.

TEPCO CanNOT Handle Fukushima, What Are the SOLUTIONS? Arnie Gundersen & Akio Matsumura

TEPCO CanNOT Handle Fukushima, What Are the SOLUTIONS? Arnie Gundersen & Akio Matsumura
July 18, 2013 | MsMilkytheclown1



In this video, Arnie Gundersen and Akio Matsumura, former Japanese ambassador to the United Nations, discuss the continuing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi site, and come to the conclusion that Tokyo Electric must be removed from the clean-up process. Arnie also discusses his 40 years in the nuclear industry, and how the worst day of that career led him to conclude that a nuclear power plant can have "Forty Good Years and One Bad Day."

Full transcript here:

http://tinyurl.com/mbczkys

Note: I moved the first 4:07 minutes to the Ending.

AM: This is really serious crisis catastrophe, not only for Japan, but the rest of the world. So that's number one. Now since the accident, you also are warning of danger of reactor number 4 which we understand is a huge contaminated water spent fuel in a pool. Now you also recently raised the issue, concern about reactor number 3. Would you kindly explain to me what is your new concern of reactor number 3 compared to reactor number 4?

AG: The condition of the site right now is precarious. As long as there's no earthquake, it'll be okay. But that's a big if where you're sort of counting on an earthquake not occurring in a country that's prone to earthquakes. And by an earthquake, I'm talking about a Richter 7 at or near the site. Now there's three problems with the site right now. The first is the enormous amount of water that's stored on the site in hundreds of tanks. Tokyo Electric isn't letting us know exactly what the radioactive material is in those sites but there's so much radiation in those tanks, we do know that the exposure to people who are outside of the plant boundary is very, very high. That tells us -- there's this phenomenon called Bremsstrahlung and the decay of radioactive material in those tanks is releasing x-rays in very high quantities off site. That means that those tanks are extraordinarily radioactive and if there is an earthquake, none of them are seismically qualified. So we could easily have a situation where 700 tanks spring leaks, it runs across the surface of the site and into the Pacific Ocean. That's more contamination in those tanks than has already been released into the Pacific Ocean.

So number one is an earthquake destroying the tanks and causing them to leak. Number two is the concern I've had for years, which is the structural condition of unit 4. Unit 4's fuel pool has the most fuel and the hottest fuel. It was recently changed out. So a loss of cooling in the unit 4 fuel pool can still lead to a fuel pool fire and contamination of vast amounts of the country. The chance of a fuel pool fire diminishes with time because the fuel becomes cooler. It's not there yet but it is approaching the point where if the pool were to lose water, it's likely that the fuel would not catch on fire. That assumes the fuel stays intact. If the earthquake is significant enough to distort the fuel and cause it to collapse, all bets are off and you can still get heating to the point of creating a fire if the fuel were to break and not be cooled.

But the third thing, Akio, is what you referred to as the unit 3 problem. Unit 3 has less fuel in it than unit 4. That's good. The bad news, though, is that unit 3 is much more severely damaged than unit 4. So if unit 4 could ride out a Richter 7 earthquake, it's likely unit 3 will not. So the risk of a structural failure in unit 3 is higher, although there's somewhat less nuclear fuel in the fuel pool, it still presents in my mind now rapidly becoming the single biggest risk on the site is a structural failure of the unit 3 building because of all the damage from the massive detonation shockwave that hit the building. The magnitude of this problem is huge. It's as if we -- the Japanese should be fighting this as if it were a war. And you don't fight a war on a budget.

And I think that's what's happening in Fukushima. Tokyo Electric has minimal funds and they're doing the best they can with minimal funds. And the Japanese government, it's easier for them to blame the problems on Tokyo Electric rather than face the fact that at the root of this problem is that there's not enough money being spent. So if you're going to solve the biggest industrial accident in history, you're going to need the funds required to do that. And I don't think either party -- Tokyo Electric or the Japanese government -- want the Japanese people to understand just how deeply in debt the Fukushima Daiichi disaster has put them. I think it's about a half a trillion to three quarters of a trillion dollars in debt to clean up the site and to clean up the prefecture....

The first problem is the ground water is continuing to leak into these reactors 400 tons a day.... after the earthquake, the entire Pacific side of Japan dropped by three feet. ... that causes the floor to crack...

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Confirmed: Fracking Triggers Quakes and Seismic Chaos

World map vector: Antun Hirsman/Shutterstock

Confirmed: Fracking Triggers Quakes and Seismic Chaos
July 11, 2013 | Mother Jones | Kate Sheppard, Jaeah Lee, and Brett Brownell

Major earthquakes thousands of miles away can trigger reflex quakes in areas where fluids have been injected into the ground from fracking and other industrial operations, according to a study published in the journal Science on Thursday.

Previous studies, covered in a recent Mother Jones feature from Michael Behar, have shown that injecting fluids into the ground can increase the seismicity of a region. This latest study shows that earthquakes can tip off smaller quakes in far-away areas where fluid has been pumped underground.

The scientists looked at three big quakes: the Tohuku-oki earthquake in Japan in 2011 (magnitude 9), the Maule in Chile in 2011 (an 8.8 magnitude), and the Sumatra in Indonesia in 2012 (an 8.6). They found that, as much as 20 months later, those major quakes triggered smaller ones in places in the Midwestern US where fluids have been pumped underground for energy extraction.

"[The fluids] kind of act as a pressurized cushion," lead author Nicholas van der Elst of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University explained to Mother Jones. "They make it easier for the fault to slide."

The finding is not entirely surprising, said van der Elst. Scientists have known for a long time that areas with naturally high subsurface fluid pressures—places like Yellowstone, for example—can see an uptick in seismic activity after a major earthquake even very far away. But this is the first time they've found a link between remote quakes and seismic activity in places where human activity has increased the fluid pressure via underground injections.

"It happens in places where fluid pressures are naturally high, so we're not so surprised it happens in places where fluid pressures are artificially high," he said.

The study looked specifically at Prague, Oklahoma, which features prominently in Behar's piece. The study links the increased tremors in Prague, which has a number of injection wells nearby, to Chile's February 27, 2010, quake. The study also found that big quakes in Japan and Indonesia triggered quakes in areas of western Texas and southern Colorado with many injection wells. The study is "additional evidence that fluids really are driving the increase in earthquakes at these sites," said van der Elst.  

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Athens under lockdown today and closed to democracy

Lifewise: Athens under lockdown today and closed to democracy
July 18, 2013 | New Statesman | Yiannis Baboulias

There are two kinds of deficit that have taken hold in Greece: the economic one, and the democratic deficit created by government spin and five years of austerity and authoritarianism.

The Greek capital will be closed for the day, nothing to see here, move along. From Panepistimio to Mets, two of the borders of the historic center of Athens, it’s about two kilometres in a straight line. From Acropolis to Mouson Avenue, it’s almost six. These are the borders of the area of Athens where a curfew has been declared for today (see map below). To get a sense of the scale, think of an area in London from Westminster to Holborn and from Marble Arch to Bethnal Green Road.

From nine in the morning till eight at night, the centre of Athens will be under lockdown. No protests or assemblies allowed. This decision (taken by the Chief of the Greek Police no less – not an elected official) was deemed necessary because the German Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble, will be visiting Athens. To ensure that nothing will hinder Schäuble’s route, or tarnish his eyes with images of dissent, the road that leads from the airport to the Greek Parliament will also be closed while he is on it.  

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