On 02 November 2011, Tokyo Electric Power Company said Reactor 2 at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was in melt down, again. Now they changed their mind!
TEPCo now says the level of xenon radiation they detected is too low to be from spontaneous fission. Can these guys get anything right?
02 November 2011, Tokyo Electric Power Company announced that melt down has re-started in Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 2.
TEPCo detected radioactive xenon-133 and xenon-135, in the reactor’s containment vessel on 02 November. They are produced during nuclear fission. TEPCo poured a boric acid solution into Reactor 2 to suppress the nuclear fission (melt down).
Analysts are speculating that the other reactors at Fukushima Daiichi could also go critical. Professor Okamoto Koji, of the University of Tokyo Graduate School, says the presence of xenon in the reactors leaves open the possibility that localized and temporary fission could still occur.
TEPCo claims that using the boric acid has cooled down the reactor.
In an effort to avoid the outrageously high tariffs that many European Union members have put on Chinese products, Chinese President Hu Jintao is in Austria hoping to make new trade deals.
Xinhua News said “The two countries should also expand their mutually beneficial economic and trade relations and make concerted efforts to fight trade protectionism and encourage mutual investment.”
Many EU countries have enforced high tariffs on Chinese products, some have even boycotted Chinese products all together. Austria is one of a few EU countries still open to Chinese imports.
In fact, Austria’s President Heinz Fischer, said Austria will play an active role in seeking the EU’s recognition of China’s full market economy status.
Over the past 40 years, the China-Austria relations have developed continuously, with China becoming Austria’s biggest trading partner, outside Europe, in 2010.
It’s interesting that many EU members are enforcing high tariffs and trade embargoes on Chinese products, yet are hoping China will bail them out of their economic mess.
“If we are going to move out of this recession, Asia is going to be part of that equation. Asia is where we are going to grow.”–Ernest Bower, Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
Next week the 21 members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) will meet in Hawaii. There U.S. officials are expected to bend over to make economic deals with Asia countries, that’s how desperate the situation is for the United States.
Ron Kirk, U.S. Trade Representative, said the main concern for the U.S. is resolving issues that affect U.S. exporters.
Last week the U.S. Congress approved a free trade deal with South Korea, however, the people of South Korea are against it and have been protesting ever since. It’s obvious governments are not going to do what their people want.
If the United States is hoping that the countries of Asia, and the Pacific Rim, are going to pull us out of the ‘recession’ then all is lost: Japan’s economy is a house of cards that’s already collapsed. China is focused on controlling inflation which is reducing consumer spending there. Vietnam, India, China, Japan and Philippines are facing off in what could turn into a war over oil rights in the South China Sea. Australia’s main economic partner is China, and Australia is expanding its naval power in the hopes that the U.S. Navy will be forced out of the region due to economic hardship. Japan and Russia are nudging closer to war over islands just north of Hokkaido. And the U.S. has already lost it’s economic advantage in South America.
Honda wants to cut north American production by 50%, and they’re blaming the latest flooding in Thailand.
Output at all six of its factories in the United States and Canada will be cut in half from November 2 through 10. Also, they will stop all production in North America for one day on November 11.
Toyota announced they will cut overtime hours at all 13 north American factories, again because of a lack of parts caused by flooding in Thailand.
“I’m running for president in the Republican party, I’m doing very well. And last time they wondered about it, but, you know the whole thing is, is boy the people are really frustrated. You go to New Hampshire there are more Independents than Republicans or Democrats.”-Ron Paul
There was a time that U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul was a member of the Libertarian Party, now he’s a Republican, but that could change.
Last week Paul told Fox News that he would not rule out running as an Independent, just that he had “…no intention of doing that.”
However, I think that if Paul continues to win republican straw polls, which are then misreported by the main stream media, and then other republican candidates get endorsed instead, then he should really consider leaving the republican party. It’s looking more and more like the elites of the republican party don’t want Paul to spoil their fun.
On October 29, presidential candidate Ron Paul won the National Federation of Republican Assemblies’ (NFRA) Iowa Straw Poll, twice! Yet they endorsed Rick Santorum!
What’s the point of holding an election if the winner (twice) is the loser? I wonder how many Iowa republicans are thinking of jumping ship?
Was Paul ignored by the NFRA because of his praise of government whistleblowers? He said whistleblowers are necessary so that we can get to the bottom of why things don’t go the way we were told they would, but more so because it could prevent war: “But the area that neither the Democrat nor the Republican leadership seems to welcome any whistle blowing is when there is an exposure on our foreign policy, the fallacies of why we go to war and what we do.”
“This may be the time not to expand production capacity. It might be better to just hoard the cash.”-John Lonski, Moody’s Capital Markets Group
This statement came after the Greek Prime Minister announced that he will let the Greek people decide if their country will accept the latest bailout offer. It seems likely they will vote against the bailout.
That move came after a member of the ruling party resigned, effectivly joining the protestors. This leaves the ruling party with a slim two seat majority in parliament.
The Greek Finance Minister also expressed doubts about what is going on: “I can no longer look at polls where the majority is against the agreement, the majority is against the program, but a majority is also in favor of staying in the euro.”-Evangelos Venizelos, Greek Finance Minister
The move to put the Greek bailout to a vote of the Greek people is causing stock markets to crash around the world. This is proof that the banking/finance industry WANTS to force Greece (and other countries) to take on bigger debt in the name of being ‘bailed out’: It actually makes governments more beholden to the private sector (Corporate America).
Now Germany and France have called a meeting between EU members and the IMF. Reports say that what’s being discussed now is a way to kick Greece out of the European Union: “The situation is so tight that basically it would be a vote over their euro membership.”-Alexander Stubb, Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade of Finland
The banking/finance industry claims that if the Greek people refuse the latest bailout loan, then Greece will default, starting a domino affect across Europe and North America. That might be true, but they might also escape the control of Corporate America.
“The top 1 percent of households took a bigger share of overall income in 2007 than they did at any time since 1928.”-Annie Lowrey, New York Times
Here’s a shocker; in New York City the top 1% average U.S.$3.7 million in income, according to Christopher Ketcham.
The IRS and the CBO have already proven with their data that the top 1% have been acting like money vampires, sucking money out of our economic system.
What kind of jobs do the 1% have? According to a CNNMoney report, 8.4% are attorneys, 14% are financial professionals, 15.7% are medical professionals, and 31% run Corporate America (executives, managers and supervisors).
Mother Jones has a more detailed breakdown. MJ also shows that most of the wealth of the top 1% is invested in paper (stocks, securities, trusts, equities), not traditional real estate.
AlterNet gives top five astounding facts about the 1%: “1. The Top 1 Percent of Americans Owns 40 Percent of the Nation’s Wealth, 2. The Top 1 Percent of Americans Take Home 24 Percent of National Income, 3. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half of the Country’s Stocks, Bonds and Mutual Funds, 4. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5 Percent of the Nation’s Personal Debt, 5. The Top 1 Percent are Taking In More of the Nation’s Income Than at Any Other Time Since the 1920s.” AlterNet breaks down each of their claims with facts.
So how many of these money suckers are there, how many vampires make up the 1%? Approximately 1,400,00 (according to the IRS). Compare that to the total U.S. population of 308,745,538 (according to 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data). 1.4 million vampires are sucking the money out of more than 300 million people!!!
And what about raising taxes on the top elites? According to IRS data, reported by Bloomberg Businessweek, the top 400, out of the 1.4 million money suckers, actually paid less taxes in 2007. These super elite vampires (the Count Draculas of the money suckers) saw their effective tax rates fall from nearly 30% in 1995 to under 17% in 2007!!!
I still don’t understand why there isn’t more of the 99% joining the Occupy America (OWS, Occupy Wall Street) movement, unless they’re under the spell of the money sucking vampire elites known as the 1%.
“The share of income going to higher-income households rose, while the share going to lower-income households fell.”-CBO Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007
The U.S. Congressional Budget Office released data that showed the top 1% of the population saw their incomes jump 275% over 28 years: “For the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007.”
The next highest income earners, the top 19% of the population (not counting the top 1%), saw their incomes go up 65%, “…much faster than
it did for the remaining 80 percent of the population…”.
As you go down the income ladder, the majority of workers (which are at the bottom of the scale) actually saw their income drop 2% to 3%: “All other groups saw their shares decline by 2 to 3 percentage points.”
This latest data backs up earlier reports from the Internal Revenue Service. In a 2007 report, the IRS said that incomes for the majority of the U.S. population had actually been dropping since 1986! They used tax filings to compile their data.
What’s been happening is that the elites have been waging a class war to suck up most of the money in our our economic system. The top 1% are not trickle downers, they are money hoarders!