Duty to Warn

The year 2012 has opened with news that Fukushima's radioactive cloud may already have killed some 14,000 Americans, according to a major study just published in the International Journal of Health Services.

Some 100 million tons of tsunami trash---much of it radiated by Fukushima fallout---has begun contaminating the beaches of our west coast.

Germany and Japan, the world's third and fourth largest economies, along with numerous others countries, have definitively turned away from the "Peaceful Atom."

But it hasn't yet been buried. That's up to us. And 2012 is the year to do it.

We are already very close. The mythical "Nuclear Renaissance" has been gutted by Fukushima, low gas prices and the escalating Solartopian revolution in green energy. Solar panels, wind turbines, sustainable bio-fuels, geo-thermal, ocean thermal, increased efficiency and much more have simply priced atomic energy out of the market.

Exercise. Lose weight. Be nicer. Work with not just this year but many future years and generations and centuries in mind.

Work with an international perspective as much as possible. Collaborate internationally as much as possible.

Work to turn last year's Arab Spring into this year's Worldwide Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter.

Help to create a worldwide movement against plutocracy and violence.

Stop thinking of defeating horrendous proposals as the only kind of "victory" possible.

Within the United States, help to advance the organization of a student loan debtors union large enough and strategic enough to both refuse payment and to build a campaign that will make education free going forward — in the United States and around the world.

Help to advance a nonviolent resistance campaign to halt foreclosures on homes, one by one, and through legislatures and courts.

Whereas most traditional historical narratives say that Jim Crow was dismantled by the modern day civil rights movement, Michelle Alexander argues otherwise in The New Jim Crow. She posits that the denial of citizenship for African Americas was the plan of the Founding Fathers, and subsequent generations of Americans have found new ways to ensure the survival of that plan. The mass incarceration of black men is the current chosen method by which America continues this practice; indeed, Alexander says it has become the “new racial caste system.”

It took two stolen US Presidential elections and the prospect of another one coming up in 2012.
For years the Democratic Party and even much of the left press has reacted with scorn for those who've reported on it.
But the imperial fraud that has utterly corrupted our electoral process seems finally to be dawning on a broadening core of the American electorate---if it can still be called that.

The shift is highlighted by three major developments:
1. The NAACP goes to the United Nations

In early December, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest civil rights organization in America, announced that it was petitioning the United Nations over the orchestrated GOP attack on black and Latino voters.

In its landmark report entitled Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP directly takes on the new Jim Crow tactics passed in fourteen states that are designed to keep minorities from voting in 2012.

When Kendra Castaneda’s beloved faced torture in solitary confinement, his beloved, a regular, Californian suburban, young woman would have never guessed that only nine months later, she would be an Examiner.com “Inspiring Americans Award” nominee for courageously sparking human rights hope for 100,000 secretly tortured people in the United States prison industrial complex, up to 6,000 in California alone, all horribly abused in solitary confinement, indefinitely, as the National Defence Authorization Act 2012 codifies.

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Copyright Deborah Dupré 2011. All Rights Reserved.

It seemed like the afterthought in the payroll tax cut extension fight, a small consolation prize to the Republicans on what should have been the easiest of bi-partisan votes. But the two-month clock is now ticking on whether Obama will approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s environmentally disastrous tar sands. If we want him to make the right decision and deny the permit, maybe it’s time to Occupy Exxon, with creative protests at local Exxon/Mobil stations. Of course we need to keep pressuring Obama. The bill’s deadline precludes anything close to the kind of comprehensive environmental review that he called for after rallies and civil disobedience at the White House led him to delay approval for a year. But why not also go after the oil companies whose influence led the Republicans to hold the rest of the unemployment and payroll tax bill hostage to the fast-track requirement. Exxon/Mobil has long been the dirtiest of the dirty among these companies. This makes them a logical target.

The trick to maintaining the US delusional democracy is feeding the illusion for citizens that voting and elections really matter. But when both major parties are owned by rich and corporate elites it matters less than most people think whether Republicans or Democrats win and control Congress or the White House. Their seeming differences are a clever distraction that keeps fooling and manipulating Americans. With the help of the mainstream media, making entertainment out of political races, Americans are deceived into thinking that elections deserve their respect and participation.

As power shifts periodically from one party to the other partner of the two-party plutocracy, the illusion of meaningful change sustains the corrupt, dysfunctional political and government system and the economy rewarding the top one percent. Winning politicians are adept at lying convincingly, especially about change and reforms and, like well advertised products, Americans consume the lies.

Someone ought to let mainstream news producers know that the nearly 4,500 US soldiers killed in the Iraq war were not the only victims. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have also been killed as a result of the unwarranted US invasion, and many more have been wounded and/or forever maimed.

Chances are, all of these Iraq war victims would still be alive today were it not for former President George Bush and his band of neoconservatives. Demonstrating a bizarre mix of evangelical ambition, cowboy bravado and the pathological desire to ‘keep Israel secure’, Iraq was destroyed over and over again.