Ralph Nader ~ The Fukushima Secrecy Syndrome – From Japan To America

CommonDreams  January 24 2014

FukushimaLast month, the ruling Japanese coalition parties quickly rammed through Parliament a state secrets law. We Americans better take notice.

Under its provisions the government alone decides what are state secrets and any civil servants who divulge any “secrets” can be jailed for up to 10 years. Journalists caught in the web of this vaguely defined law can be jailed for up to 5 years.

Government officials have been upset at the constant disclosures of their laxity by regulatory officials before and after the Fukushima nuclear power disaster in 2011, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

“The Obama administration must become more alert to authoritarian trends in Japan that its policies have been either encouraging or knowingly ignoring – often behind the curtains of our own chronic secrecy.”

Week after week, reports appear in the press revealing the seriousness of the contaminated water flow, the inaccessible radioactive material deep inside these reactors and the need to stop these leaking sites from further poisoning the land, food and ocean. Officials now estimate that it could take up to 40 years to clean up and decommission the reactors.

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American Fascism: Ralph Nader Decries How Big Business Has Taken Control Of The U.S. Government [Video]

Democracy Now June 4 2013

Franklin D. RooseveltDescribing the United States as an “advanced Third World country,” longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader calls for a new mass movement to challenge the power corporations have in Washington. “It is not too extreme to call our system of government now ‘American fascism.’ It’s the control of government by big business, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined in 1938 as fascism,” Nader says.

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Erik Garcés ~ Your Vote Is Meaningless When The System Is Corrupt

The Jeenyus Corner | October 5 2012

Dennis Kucinich

When you vote, you legitimatize the system which enslaves us. Keep in mind the most fundamentally misunderstood fact of our existence. All government is by consent of the governed. That’s irrefutable.

Einstein’s definition of insanity was repeating a task and expecting a different result each time. If elections really could make a difference, wouldn’t they have by now? By definition, when you participate in this process, that is insanity.

Moreover, choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

So many people simply cannot break their lifetime of conditioning to see these fundamentals. They will argue to their death to protect the very system used to control them.

What’s being consciously ignored is that when one force controls both sides in an election, you don’t have an election. The choices are statism at breakneck speed OR arriving there just a little bit slower. When one party’s advocacy for government expansion arouses too much objection, the statism is shifted to the other direction as the other party installed becomes publicly perceived as the “reformer”.

No matter the electoral results, debt and death will come from the welfare/warfare system of the American Empire created by money power. Your true masters.

That’s the scam.

If we carefully examine the factual history of the last century, and not through the prism of corporate controlled media and state controlled schools, we can easily see the pattern. That’s what the system has winnowed out: your ability to connect the dots.

No matter which party is in power, you’re kept emotionally (but never logically) connected to one or the other parties. There are never, EVER allowed to be third alternatives. We’re encouraged to debate endlessly over personalities and policy but never are we allowed to question that its the very system itself that is the problem.

In the rare cases that some outside candidate breaks through, the system reacts quickly and violently to destroy that person and then rapidly changes the rules to ensure that something like that never happens again.

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Not A Peep About President’s Praise for War

Laura Flanders (The Nation) | Reader Supported News | January 27 2012

OPINION | The grades for the president’s State of the Union are in and the critics have been kind. In fact, it’s chilling to see just how few hits the president takes for couching his entire address in unqualified celebration of the US military.

Speaking of the troops, President Obama began: “At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations.”

Post-show pundits on cable news praised the president’s comfort with his commander-in-chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news – of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq. Accompanying Obama’s next phrase, “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example,” no one thus far has played vile viral video. The critics have been kind.

The president chose to celebrate the US military; the press chose not to raise a peep about the spread of US militarism. Yet US targets proliferate – abroad – with unmanned drones assassinating unconvicted suspects in innumerable undeclared wars. And militarism spreads at home. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act makes indefinite military detention without charge or trial a permanent feature of the American legal system.  It’s kind of the critics not to mention that – or the president’s four-year-old pledge to close Guantanamo, and to restore the “rule of law.”

“They’re not consumed with personal ambition… They work together,” continued the president (again, speaking of the troops.) There are surely plenty of troops who would disagree. The tally is long of commanders and pigeon hawk commanders-of-commanders who’ve dodged responsibility, fingered underlings and permitted rank-and-file “bad-apples” to take the heat for US war crimes.

“Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops,” the president concluded.

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