Like a movie with the dialogue and action out of sync, official updates about the unfolding disaster at Fukushima Daiichi seem to trail at some distance behind the analysis provided by Vermont’s nuclear watchdog Arnie Gundersen.

Today, just as a new 6.6 aftershock rattled the stricken region, the evacuation zone around the ailing plant is finally being expanded beyond the initial 20-mile radius.  

Continuing our practice of bringing Arnie’s valuable insights to the GMD community, we offer the following close look at the science undermining the integrity of the fuel rods:

Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen demonstrates how Fukushima’s fuel rods melted and shattered from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

This  nonsense in Maine over the Labor Dept. mural cuts pretty close to my last nerve.  Our entire family consists of artists; and we have experienced more than our fair share of censorship attempts.  

That is what we’re talking about in Maine…censorship.  In the liberty-casual U.S.A. we’re more familiar with censorship efforts directed at “offensive” images…mostly having to do with nudity and bodily functions with which Americans have never been entirely comfortable.  Former Governor Douglas’s blushing banishment of the Greek Slave from his statehouse desk springs readily to mind.

We regard political censorship as something foreign and unlikely on these shores.  But here it is, in all its autocratic glory: a genuine act of political censorship; right here in one of our Yankee sister-states!  It has certainly raised comment, but not nearly on the level that one might expect, given all that is at stake.  We’re busy parsing words about misappropriation of funds and the public’s right to access when we should be genuinely alarmed, conjuring memories of Nazi Germany, where the manipulation of public art played a significant role in a certain paper-hanger’s propaganda machine.  Okay; it’s my turn to hyperventilate and invoke the other “N” word.

There is a class-war on in this country.  This time, it is not the creation of a restless underclass; rather, it is a cynical construct generated by the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country; people like the Koch Bros., and the Waltons who hit the jackpot with a little discount store called Walmart.   Both have made the effort to defund public education central to their political “philanthropy”; and they champion a regressive social agenda that finds favor with the extreme right.  

They understand that their goal of unbridled corporate dominance of America’s economic resources will depend as much on dumbing-down the “Have-Not” population and redirecting their anger away from the “Haves”, as it will on any direct political funding. So the targets become public education, public television and radio…and those dangerous expressive arts.  They pull funding, revise textbooks, remove images and attempt to re-write science.

I do not invoke Nazi Germany casually.  It has become the shrill invective of last resort; often hurled by an accuser who hasn’t the first clue that the Nazis and their fellow travelers were right-wing extremists, social conservatives and about as far from being socialists as one could get.  I waited a long time before drawing that equation because it runs the risk of simply being lost in the noise.  But here is where I’m coming from:

In the early 1970’s, I spent a couple of years living in Berlin with my sculptor husband who was a guest of the Deutsches Akademischer Austauschdienst.

Our good friends, American sculptor, Ed Kienholz and his wife Nancy had already been living there for several years and had become immersed in the history of the Third Reich, which figures significantly in their work from those Berlin years.

Naturally, we were drawn into the conversation, and I began to read everything about the period that I could lay my hands upon.  What most concerned us all was the manner in which the good people we saw all around us had been alternately seduced and entangled in the monstrous social experiment that was Nazi Germany.  

I say “good people” without  a trace of irony because they were good people, just as the vast majority of Tea Party followers are good people.  As individuals, most of them would have given you the shirt off their backs. Even my father-in-law, who survived the camps but lost all but two of his family members…even he always insisted that

“there are no bad people…there are only bad leaders.”

That is what is so very dangerous about the slippery slope from simple pliant ignorance to complicit barbarism; it is a path that might be travelled by even the best among us if we succumb to the argument that intellectual thought and science and the arts may be subverted to serve an overarching political agenda of neo-patriotism and religious intolerance.

The left is always poorly equipped to meet this brazen enemy of thought because we sit in stunned disbelief far too long.  It is in the vacuum of that stunned silence (or as we frame our carefully measured response) that  folks like Rand Paul and Governor Walker are emboldened to reach still further.   We count too much on common sense prevailing, and we discount the powerful nectar of blissful ignorance.

I can’t help imagining American militia groups (our home-grown Brown Shirts) assembling behind the Tea Party luminaries; and I see parallels between the economic chaos of the Weimer Republic, which gave rise to those Brown Shirts in Germany, and the economic dysfunction we have been experiencing here since the collapse of the Wall Street ponzi schemes.  They too were emerging from a costly, humiliating, and winless war.

Both have led to a less civilized society, ripe to be misled into attacking scapegoats and indulging right-wing extremism.  It is here that I begin replaying the first chapters of “Inside the Third Reich” in my head again.

We have teetered on the brink more than once in the past,  recovering our sense of proportion in time to save our liberties and hold up the standard of human decency once again.  But so had Germany maintained a relatively tolerant, intellectually free society right up until it plunged clean over that cliff…practically over-night.  

It would serve us well to bear in mind that Hitler did not march on Berlin to seize power in a coup de tat.  His reign of terror began quietly enough with insidious Brown Shirt successes achieved within a democratic election process.

It’s time to set aside that pocket Constitution for a moment and pick-up a history book…but not a Texan textbook.

The writing is on the wall.

It’s time we had a conversation about “growth.”  



By that, I mean it’s time to challenge the model that shapes contemporary economic assumptions and society as a whole.  I have only a layman’s perspective, but it seems to me that the conventional wisdom that “growth” rather than “sustainability” is the primary goal for human enterprise, is fundamentally unsound.  

Even on the most abstract plane, one can argue that the nature of our visible world is self-limiting and finite; so it stands to reason that economic models and expectations that do not honor that blanket truth represent magic thinking.  

Nature strives perpetually for balance in order to sustain its life-forces; and when uncontrolled growth runs amok in nature, it is a cancer that quickly extinguishes life.  We see this principle demonstrated  all around us every single day, and yet the economic and political assumptions that drive human endeavor remain stubbornly resistant to the lessons being repeated by the natural world since long before mankind learned to count.

Some consideration has been given, from time to time, to population, with all its implications; but we never seem to have extrapolated from that conversation about population to one about the inherent folly of striving for perpetual economic growth.  We’re actually more comfortable talking about the possibility of limiting human population, with all that implies, than we are with the idea of abandoning forever any idea of growing richer…let alone the thought that achieving a truly sustainable world at this point would most likely require that some of us should be somewhat poorer.  

Ironically, nature is pretty good at limiting populations, unaided by human intervention; but as economic models are human constructs, nature can’t apply the brakes.

Wall Street, that pinnacle of magic thinking, has foisted on us the idea that unlimited growth is not only possible but compulsory; so much so that corporations engage in all kinds of financial sleight-of-hand to convince their stock-holders that they are meeting this phantom goal.   And the interests of Wall Street have become firmly wedded with domestic economic policy.  They are almost indistinguishable now.  Those interests almost completely exclude sustainability in order to focus on the next quarter’s bottom line.

In a finite system,  for some to benefit from perpetual growth, perpetual contraction is necessary in an opposing sector.  This is the stuff of expanding income inequities that are rendering thread-bare the very fabric of America.

The politicians and conventional media won’t talk about it, because it flies in the face of the great American myth of upward mobility; so it’s really up to us.  

Pass it on.

We are pleased to be able to bring you another segment of expert analysis of the unfolding crisis at Fukushima Daiichi, from Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Associates.

Throughout the crisis so far, Arnie’s insights have anticipated new revelations from Tokyo Electric, and explained the underlying science from which he draws his conclusions.

This is an amazing and accessible resource for which we are very grateful.

How does that saying go?  If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas?

Thanks to a provision authored by Bernie Sanders in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, it has been revealed that between December 2007 and March 2010, the Federal Reserve loaned over $26 billion dollars to the Arab Banking Corporation, the majority of which is owned by the Libyan government! The interest rate for those loans?  Practically nothing…0.25%! [one-quarter of one percent]* This corporation’s toehold in the U.S. consists of exactly  two branches, both located in New York City (one identified as the “U.S. Branch” and the other, as the “Grand Cayman Branch.”)

Wow!  ‘Way to honor your commitment to  the American taxpayers, Federal Reserve!

Says Senator Sanders:

In another dubious twist, the Fed loans, at interest rates as low as 0.25 percent, relied on U.S. Treasury securities as collateral. In other words, at the same time that the Arab Banking Corp. was borrowing money at almost zero interest from one arm of the government, the Fed, it was lending money at a higher interest rate to another arm of the U.S. government, the Treasury Department.

This, while small U.S. businesses find it to be like squeezing water from a stone to get any kind of help from U.S. banks; and while tens of thousands of Americans face foreclosure and ruin.

There’s ample reason why we are awash in cynicism these days.

Anyway, Senator Sanders has sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke,  Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner,  and John Walsh (Acting Comptroller of the Currency and Admin. of National Banks) demanding an accounting for this extraordinary behavior.  The letter poses a number of questions that beg where exactly the Federal Reserve’s allegiance lies:

.Why would the U.S. government exempt the Arab Banking Corp. from economic sanctions when it is primarily owned by the Central Bank of Libya?

.How many U.S. Treasury Securities does the Arab Banking Corp. currently own?

.How much money has the Federal Reserve lent to the Arab Banking Corp. since December 1, 2010?

.Is it in the U.S.’s interest to be borrowing and lending money from a bank that is predomiantly owned by the Central Bank of Libya?

.How may U.S. Treasury Securities did the Arab Banking Corp. purchase when it was borrowing money from the Federal Reservve’s various emergency lending facilities?

and finally:

.Why would the U.S. government allow a bank that is predominantly owned by the Central Bank of Libya..an institution on which the U.S. has imposed strict economic sanctions.. to operate two banking branches within our own borders?

The letter itself is well-worth a read as it contains many points of fact that will only serve to increase your level of indignation.

* corrected

As several people have raised question about the 5% administrative fee I mention in the latter part of this piece, I decided to contact Roger Marcoux of the Sheriff’s Association for clarification.  His response is now posted in comments

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I bring these stories of Franklin County municipal monkey-business to the GMD community both to entertain you and as object lessons in how far out of whack the local process can become when citizens don’t keep their hands upon the throttle.

The melodrama over the St. Albans Town policing contract continues to unfold.  Sheriff Robert Norris is now suing the City of St. Albans for “predatory pricing” practices and is seeking an injunction to prevent the Town’s contract with the City from going into effect.

As you may recall, the Town Selectboard voted by a margin of 3 to 2 to award that contract to the City of St. Albans, whose bid for the job came in at one-million dollars less than the Sheriff’s bid.  

There was a general rhubarb raised over this decision by the Sheriff and his merry band, egged-on by Selectboard Chair Bill Nihan who had flip-flopped to the pro-Sheriff side in time to represent one of the two dissenting votes, after initially saying he supported awarding the contract to the City.  But then, it was coming up to election time, and Mr. Nihan needed those pro-sheriff voters in order to squeak by for re-lection… which he did, by just twelve ballots.

In the previous election, he had barely made it by two votes; and we are now learning that those two ballots may be presumed to have been from his two sons who live and work in New York City (in the financial industry, of course), as they have apparently been routinely voting in St. Albans for years despite little to suggest that they ever lived here!  According to the Messenger, the voter status of those two junior Nihans is currently under investigation.  But that’s another story for another time…

There was also a star-turn by the Town Manager, Christine Murphy, who, we are led to believe, took it upon herself to approach the Sheriff for a new, lower bid after the Selectboard had already voted to award the contract to the City.

I’ve seen video-tape of the Selectboard meeting following this indiscretion, and came away with the distinct impression that someone put her up to it.  It was, to put it mildly, a complete circus, stage-managed on the eve of the Town Meeting vote to bring out the Sheriff’s supporters and get them to the polls.

The Sheriff is alleging that the difference between the City’s original price quote for services, given in 2007, and the one given in 2010 is evidence of price-fixing.  Says the Sheriff, the City is trying to monopolize police services.  This, despite the fact that, according to the Messenger, the Sheriff’s office currently provides coverage for 62% of Franklin County’s population and the City only serves 15%.  Even with the City holding the new contract for Town policing, the Sheriff’s share of the county pie will only be reduced to 50%, while the City’s share would rise to 28%.

Beyond the obvious incongruity of the Sheriff’s monopoly claim, there is the small matter that both entities are public services, and municipal police services are exempt by law from anti-trust regulation.  

Of course, in order to qualify for a preliminary injunction, the matter must represent some irreparable harm or injury to the plaintiff.  According to the Messenger,

“Only economic loss that threatens the survival of a movant’s (plaintiff’s) business amount to irreparable harm,” city lawyers said, quoting case law. “Plaintiff claims a monetary loss here, but provides no evidence of a threat to the ‘survival of his business.”

Wait a second!  “His business?!!”  I thought this guy’s business was doing the work of the elected Sheriff of Franklin County!  

I rather doubt anyone  remembers a little piece I wrote way back in July of last year about “Benefits Bob.” That’s the way some folks apparently refer to Sheriff Norris.  

At the time, Norris, a nominal Democrat, was being challenged in the upcoming election by a couple of Republicans, and one of them, Paul Moritz, had an interesting take on how the office might better be served.  He pointed to the $65,000. salary that the Sheriff was paid by the state and promised that, unlike Mr. Norris, should he win election he would “make do” with this modest compensation, returning the 5%  “administrative fee” charged on private contracts, to the Department.  You see, the custom is for that “administrative fee” to go straight into Sheriff Norris’ pocket, raising his annual income from $65,000. to $112,000.   I believe I called it a “handsome” $112,000.

No wonder Sheriff Norris sees an injury to his personal “business” in award of the contract to the City!  There are some other shenanigans alleged to have happened within the Sheriff’s Department, but, as Mr. Moritz lost his bid for the office, I doubt we’ll hear much more about them for a while.

Sometimes I think I’ve stumbled onto the set of “Green Acres.”

It was a long-awaited day in court for the Vermont Natural Resource Council, local farmer Marie Frey, and members of the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth (of which I am an active member.)

After eight years of controversy, appeals of the permit for a proposed Walmart at exit 20 of I-89 in St. Albans Town had a final half-hour of oral arguments before the Vermont Supreme Court this past Wednesday at the Vermont Law School in S. Royalton.

The room was packed with about a hundred spectators.  As if to illustrate our claim that the local permit review process had been contaminated by conspicuous and persistent conflicts of interest, former Town Selectboard Chairman, Bill Nihan, took his seat in the front row, cheek-to-jowel with applicant Jeff Davis of JLD Properties, his attorney Stewart McConaughy, and project engineer Sam Ruggiano.  

Mr. Nihan has been a consistent figure in Town government throughout the Walmart saga, even popping-up on the special “Ad-Hoc Committee” that was formed by the Northwest Regional Planning Commission, under pressure from the Town, to “reconsider” Davis’ Walmart project after the usual NRPC Project Review Committee had rejected it.  Not surprisingly, that “Ad-Hoc Committee,” under the heavy thumb of Mr. Nihan and friends, returned a decision favorable to the project.  But Mr. Nihan does not even play a minor role in our assertions of a tainted process.

In fact, the pattern of conflicts of interest throughout the process was so widespread and insidious that former VNRC attorney Jon Groveman was forced to narrowly focus on the most egregious examples (due to filing limits on the number of words in the written arguments.)

The abundant evidence of conflicts of interest that was included in the written arguments was not wasted on the Supreme Court justices who peppered attorneys from both sides with many questions on the issue.  Everyone, even the attorney for JLD, seemed to finally agree upon the existence of those conflicts. What remained to be evaluated was the validity of the applicant’s assertion that, since the Environmental Court hearing (the venue for our appeal of the Act 250 decision)  was considered “de novo,” meaning a new look at the evidence, contamination of the local permit process was unimportant.

As VNRC’s Jared Margolis very ably argued, if the Supremes were to accept this view of the local permit process, it  would send an appalling message that corruption could simply be overlooked; and it would have a “chilling effect” on concerned citizens’ access to that process.  If those citizens did not possess the financial means to appeal a local decision to the Environmental Court, they would simply be deprived of their right to a fair hearing.  

Other issues being appealed included the complete absence of evidence provided by the applicant that the project would be compatible with a large and thriving family vegetable farm and farm-stand located just a third of a mile down the road; and the omission by the applicant  of evidence with regard to the impacts of “secondary growth” that would inevitably accompany location of the Walmart.  Mr. Davis’ attorneys have insisted that there will be no secondary growth; an argument that, for anyone familiar with the retail boom around the Walmart near Taft’s Corners, really stretches credibility beyond the breaking point.

The final points of law argued in the appeals concerned Res Judicata and Collateral Estoppel which are principles of settled law.  As I understand it, we are arguing that, because a similar, albeit smaller Walmart, was proposed in 1993 for exactly the same parcel of land, and ultimately denied a permit by the Supreme Court, the applicant cannot propose what is essentially the same project in the same location, again.    Without this safeguard, an applicant with deep pockets might ultimately prevail simply by exhausting the resources of opponents in successive applications for the same project.

So that is the long and the short of it.  Some will be dismayed that so little of the obvious economic and environmental arguments against the project actually made it into the Supreme Court appeals, but there are practical limits both to the length and scope of arguments that could be made within the constraints of the venue.  

Despite the fact that preserving the working rural landscape was one of the principle intentions of Act 250, the fate of Marie Frey’s farm is reduced in the appeals to little more than a debate over geographical standing and semantics.  This is particularly ironic since the Hudak Farm is the quintessential rural Vermont success story. Formerly a struggling dairy operation, Hudak Farm has been transformed over the past generation into a thriving crop-farm, and is now completing the challenging transition to fully organic methods.  Throughout their business journey, the farm has made significant contributions to local schools and always upheld responsible stewardship for the environment.

I am told that the decision is not likely to be announced for several months.  The judges must draft careful opinions on each aspect of the combined appeals.  Their decision with regard to conflicts of interest, alone, has particular significance for the future of Vermont’s citizen access. The very legitimacy of Vermont’s cherished local control hangs in the balance.

Stay tuned.

Once again, Vermont’s own Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds  Associates is stepping in to the analysis void in order to explain the science of radiation and some of the terminology we have been hearing with regard to its release at Fukushima Daiichi.

Arnie has provided a concise and manageable reference for the average person grappling with an unfamiliar and frightening subject.  For that I am very grateful.

Every morning I search the papers for news of Japan’s nuclear crisis, and even though the situation grows steadily worse there, the unfolding crisis seems to get pushed further and further back in the news cycle.  

Events in Libya have justifiably stolen some thunder from the “story” of the catastrophe; but what makes Michele Bachman’s latest lunacy front page news?   The Free Press has a small piece about the mounting death toll in Japan on page 3A, but that was it for the freeps; and the rather significant news that the core may be breached in reactor # 3 only made it to page seven of the New York Times!

One has to ask the question: is it our abysmally short attention span to which the press is catering, or is the nuclear industry “managing” news of the unfolding crisis in Japan so as to quickly diffuse public anxiety before it can wreak havoc with corporate interests?  Either way, it isn’t a pretty picture; but if it is the latter, one can’t help reflecting on the irony.   One of the most highly industrialized nations in the world may be, in this profound instance, a victim of the same kind of corporate “amnesia wash” that swept the gulf oil spill from the public consciousness in just a few short months.

Sometimes you’ve just got to re-state the obvious.  Entergy doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “no” and the NRC seems to be suffering from short-term memory loss.

In light of the Fukushima crisis, our “DC-3” (Leahy, Sanders and Welch) have issued the following joint statement:

“It is hard to understand how the NRC could move forward with a license extension for Vermont Yankee at exactly the same time as a nuclear reactor of similar design is in partial meltdown in Japan.  We believe that Entergy should respect and abide by Vermont’s laws and the MOU signed with the state in 2002, which require approval by the Vermont Legislature, and then the Vermont Public Service Board, for the plant to continue to operate beyond 2012.”

Our thoughts exactly.