The DISH

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Vol. 14 No. 49…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…December 5, 2011

Bit of History

Arundhati Roy

"Is globalization about 'the eradication of world poverty,' or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?"

Born November 24, 1961 in Shillong, Meghalaya, India to Ranjit Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea planter and Mary Roy, a Malayali Syrian Christian women's rights activist, Arundhati Roy spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala. She attended school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. Roy left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla; she made a living selling empty bottles. Roy studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, where she met her first husband, architect Gerard da Cunha.

In 1984, Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen. She played a village girl in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib. She worked at various jobs, including running aerobics classes at five-star hotels in New Delhi and writing screenplays, while working for television. She won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1989, for the screenplay of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, a movie based on her experiences as a student of architecture, directed by her husband, and Electric Moon (1992).

In 1992, Roy began writing The God of Small Things, her first novel, which is semi-autobiographical, capturing major parts of her childhood experiences. Published in 1996, the book about India's caste system catapulted Roy to instant international fame. It received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and reached fourth position on the New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. A commercial success, the book received critical acclaim in Canada and the US, while being criticized in India for its "unrestrained description of sexuality."

While she has worked on screenplays and written for the television serial The Banyan Tree, and the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002), since publishing The God of Small Things Roy has written mainly nonfiction and devoted her time to politics and working for social causes. She is a spokesperson of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and of the global policies of the United States. She is also a critic of India's nuclear weapons policies and its approach to industrialization and rapid development as currently practiced, including the Narmada Dam and other hydroelectric projects that displace millions of people with little or no compensation, lack of irrigation, drinking water or other benefits.

Roy has been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy. She disputes US claims of being a peaceful and freedom-loving nation, listing China and nineteen 3rd World countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since WWII. In the final analysis, Roy sees American-style capitalism as the culprit: "In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines."

In 2002, Roy won the Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Award for her work "about civil societies that are adversely affected by the world's most powerful governments and corporations," in order "to celebrate her life and her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity." Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence. In January 2006, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, a national award from India's Academy of Letters, for her collection of essays on contemporary issues, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, but she declined to accept it "in protest against the Indian Government toeing the US line by 'violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation.'"

In November 2011, she was awarded the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing. In addition to her novel, Roy has written mostly non-fiction works that include, The End of Imagination (1998), The Cost of Living (1999), which contains the essays "The Greater Common Good" and "The End of Imagination," The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002) and An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire (2004). She has written dozens of opinion pieces on a range of political issues that have appeared in major newspapers, (Sources: www.luminarium.org en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundhati_Roy, www.weroy.org, and www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFOuSoy5H-k)

Intuit's Vibe

Interview with Arundhati Roy (Excerpts)

By Arun Gupta

In this exclusive interview for the Guardian, Roy offers her thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, the role of the imagination, reclaiming language, and what is next for a movement that has reshaped America's political discourse and seized the world's attention.

AG: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?

AR: How could I not want to visit? Given what I've been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People's University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.

AG: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?

AR: I don't think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don't think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters. We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise. It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.

AG: Your essays, "The Greater Common Good" and "Walking with the Comrades", concern corporations, the military and state violently occupying other people's lands in India. How do those occupations and resistance relate to the Occupy Wall Street movement?

AR: I hope that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East. Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen.

AG: In the United States, as I'm sure you're aware, political discourse is obsessed with the middle class, but the Occupy movement has made the poor and homeless visible for the first time in decades in the public discourse. Could you comment on that?

AR: It's so much a reversal of what you see in India. In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms. Whereas, here, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

AG: As a writer, what do you make of the term "occupation", which has now somehow been reclaimed as a positive term when it's always been one of the most heinous terms in political language?

AR: As a writer, I've often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom. So I think that turning the word "occupation" on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. We ought to say, "Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq," "Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan," "Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine." The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.

AG: As a novelist, you write a lot in terms of motivations and how characters interpret reality. Around the country, many occupiers we've talked to seem unable to reconcile their desires about Obama with what Obama really represents. When I talk to them about Obama's record, they say, "Oh, his hands are tied; the Republicans are to blame, it's not his fault." Why do you think people react like this, even at the occupations?

AR: Even in India, we have the same problem. We have a right wing that is so vicious and so openly wicked, which is the Baratiya Janata party (BJP), and then we have the Congress party, which does almost worse things, but does it by night. And people feel that the only choices they have are to vote for this or for that. And my point is that, whoever you vote for, it doesn't have to consume all the oxygen in the political debate. It's just an artificial theatre, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you're supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you're trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations. Even if we do vote, we should just spend less time and intellectual energy on our choices and keep our eye on the ball.

AG: So it's also a failure of the imagination?

AR: It's walking into a pretty elaborate trap. But it happens everywhere, and it will continue to happen. Even I know that if I go back to India, and tomorrow the BJP comes to power, personally I'll be in a lot more trouble than with the Congress [party] in power. But systemically, in terms of what is being done, there's no difference, because they collaborate completely, all the time. So I'm not going to waste even three minutes of my time, if I have to speak, asking people to vote for this one or for that one. (Read the full interview at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/30/arundhati-roy-interview.)

Hood Notes

Discontent with US Grows at Climate Talks

By Arthur Max

Leading American environmentalists complained to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday that her negotiators at the UN climate talks risked portraying the US as an obstacle to fighting global warming because of its perceived foot-dragging on key issues.

Separately, European delegates and the head of the African bloc at the 192-party talks also denounced US positions at the talks which are seeking ways to curb the ever-expanding emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

"Developed countries as a whole are not taking climate change seriously as a global issue," Seyni Nafo, of Mali, said. "Look at the UN. We use and we welcome their leadership on democracy, on access to markets, on human rights issues. We would want to have the same leadership to tackle climate change because for us in the developing world the biggest threat, the biggest enemy, is climate change."

Discontent directed at the US came as the UN's top climate scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, warned the conference's participants that global warming is leading to human dangers and soaring financial costs but that containing carbon emissions will have a host of benefits.

Although he gave no explicit deadlines, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change implied that the world only has a few years before the earth is irreversibly damaged by accumulations of carbon in the atmosphere.

The letter to Clinton, signed by the chief executives of 16 major non-profit groups, also stressed the urgency of finding solutions to the world's emissions of carbon dioxide, mainly from burning fossil fuels for energy, industry and transportation.

"This is a critical meeting and we are rapidly running out of time to avert the worst impacts of climate change," it said.

It reminded Clinton of President Barack Obama's presidential campaign pledges to move the US back into the forefront of global cooperation on global warming.

"Three years later, America risks being viewed not as a global leader on climate change but as a major obstacle to progress," said the letter. It was signed by the heads of the Environmental Defence Fund, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defence Council and other major environmental lobby and activist groups.

Anger was directed at the US conditions for negotiating a deal that would legally bind all countries to limit their emissions and for holding up discussion on how to raise $100-billion earmarked for poor countries to develop low carbon economies and deal with the effects of global warming.

Instead of a binding agreement, the US has said it favors voluntary pledges by countries to do as much as they can to control emissions. At the last climate conference a year ago in Cancun, Mexico, some 80 countries listed the actions they were taking to reduce emissions or at least lower their rate of growth.

Jonathan Pershing, the US delegate, told reporters this week he did not believe those pledges would change in the near future. The US has promised to cut its emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.

Taken together, those voluntary pledges amount to about half of what scientists say is needed to avert potential climate disaster, said the European Union's chief negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger.

"Those who seem to think that it is enough for current pledges to stay as they are up to 2020 seem to be overlooking those facts," he said.

"The longer you wait, delaying action, the more expensive and disruptive it will be and the greater the risk" of missing the target set by Pachauri's IPCC after compiling years of studies and projections.

Runge-Metzger acknowledged the US delegation may be hamstrung by US the domestic political scene where climate change is perceived as an unpopular issue.

"The US could set a good example but we all know the situation of the US at home. It's very hard for the Obama administration to move forward with climate change because of the situation in congress."

In his briefing to the convention, Pachauri outlined the dangers science anticipates unless carbon emissions are curbed.

Heat waves currently experienced once every 20 years will happen every other year by the end of this century, he said.

Coastal areas and islands are threatened with inundation by global warming, rain-reliant agriculture in Africa will shrink by half and many species will disappear. Within a decade, up to 250-million more people will face the stress of scarce water.

Increasingly frequent weather disasters have imposed heavy financial burdens with some poor countries running up 90% of their national debt to deal with the aftermath of storms, droughts and floods, he said. But the Indian scientist said "many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed" by reducing emissions.

To stabilize carbon concentrations in the atmosphere would slow economic growth by 0.12% per year, he said, but those costs would be offset by improved health, greater energy security and more secure food supplies. (Source: http://mg.co.za/specialreport/cop17-durban-2011)

News You Use

Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here?

By Michael Moore

This past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. It was attended by 40+ people and the discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement's "vision statement" to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:

We Envision: [1] a truly free, democratic, and just society; [2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus; [3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making; [4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others; [5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments; [6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few; [7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings; [8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible; [9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.

The next step will be to develop a specific list of goals and demands. As one of the millions of people who are participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, I would like to respectfully offer my suggestions of what we can all get behind now to wrestle the control of our country out of the hands of the 1% and place it squarely with the 99% majority.

Here are 10 Things I will propose to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:

1. Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations, including a tax on all Wall Street trading.

2. Assess a penalty tax on any corporation that moves American jobs to other countries when that company is already making profits in America.

3. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all of their earnings

4. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, placing serious regulations on how business is conducted by Wall Street and the banks.

5. Investigate the Crash of 2008, and bring to justice those who committed any crimes.

6. Reorder our nation's spending priorities (including the ending of all foreign wars and their cost of over $2 billion a week). This will re-open libraries, reinstate band and art and civics classes in our schools, fix our roads and bridges and infrastructure, wire the entire country for 21st century internet, and support scientific research that improves our lives.

7. Join the rest of the free world and create a single- payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time.

8. Reduce carbon emissions that are destroying the planet and discover ways to live without the oil that will be depleted and gone by the end of this century.

9. Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company's workers.

10. We, the people, must pass three constitutional amendments that will go a long way toward fixing the core problems. These include: a) A constitutional amendment that fixes our broken electoral system by 1) completely removing campaign contributions from the political process; 2) requiring all elections to be publicly financed; 3) moving election day to the weekend to increase voter turnout; 4) making all Americans registered voters at the moment of their birth; 5) banning computerized voting and requiring that all elections take place on paper ballots. b) A constitutional amendment declaring corporations are not people and do not have the constitutional rights of citizens. This amendment should also state that the interests of the public and society must always come before the interests of corporations. c) A constitutional amendment that will act as a "second bill of rights" as proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: that every American has a human right to employment, to health care, to a free and full education, to breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat safe food, and to be cared for with dignity and respect in their old age.

Let me know what you think. Occupy Wall Street enjoys the support of millions. It is a movement that cannot be stopped. Become part of it by sharing your thoughts with me or online (at OccupyWallSt.org). Get involved in (or start!) your own local Occupy movement. Make some noise. You don't have to pitch a tent in lower Manhattan to be an Occupier.

Politics Y2K11

The Shocking Truth: Occupy Crackdown (Excerpts)

By Naomi Wolf

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women - targeted seemingly for their gender - screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

Oakland, California riot police advance on peaceful Occupy Oakland, November 3, 2011.But just when Americans thought we had the picture - was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? - the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being - falsely - informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that right-wing pundits and politicians on the TV shows were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilization against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks - under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop - awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response. That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act - the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list - and especially the last agenda item - the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them. (Read the entire article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy)

Disgruntled feels: Historic! The unemployment rate for November declined from 9.0 to 8.6 percent based on a meager 120,000 new jobs. The meager job growth was aided by a decline in the labor force participation rate as more people became discouraged and quit looking or exhausted unemployment benefits. The bulk of the new jobs came in the service sector as retailers apparently hired additional workers for X-Mas, the biggest retail season of the year. Chances are great that these jobs will disappear with the new year. For more than three decades, I have been studying employment data, and I have never favored changes in how the unemployment rate is calculated. Nevertheless, despite the tweaks over time, the historic pattern of unemployment between blacks and whites has remained remarkably stable, fluctuating only marginally since the data was first collected in the 1950s. Even more eerie, the unemployment disparity and the resulting income disparity between blacks and whites mimic the Three-Fifths Compromise of Article 1 Section 2. Historically, blacks are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. For the November 2011 data, the black unemployment rate rose from 15.1 to 15.5 percent, while the white unemployment rate fell from 8.0 to 7.6 percent, for a ratio of 2.04. And, historically, the black to white median family income ratio is roughly three-fifths. You cannot make this stuff up and it cannot happen without planning. This historic pattern of unemployment is what our president should be focused on changing rather than working overtime to kill Social Security by cutting payroll taxes, which will do little to stimulate job growth in either the black or white community.

Disgruntled says: With the morals and ethics of a warthog, Newt Gingrich dared suggest that no one in really poor neighborhoods works, so, children have no adult role models that report to a job and get paid. According to Gingrich, the only role models in these neighborhoods of people getting paid involve illegal activities. Obviously, he is not familiar with the working poor that go to work every day but simply do not earn enough on their minimum wage jobs to dig themselves out of poverty. What poor children see are parents working themselves into an early grave only to remain poor. Gingrich suggests poor children replace their school's janitorial staff. At a typical elementary school, the janitorial staff numbers no more than four (4) individuals, so not many children will be employed cleaning toilets under Newt's regime. How much will they earn? Will the amount be comparable to the adult staff or something less than minimum wage? Moreover, what will the working poor adults they replace do for jobs once theirs have been given to children? Newt sounds like someone whose only knowledge of poor neighborhoods is based on gangster rap. He needs to learn to think these things through before opening his trap. He has a really bad habit of speaking before he thinks, and for a presidential candidate that habit can be extremely dangerous. It is obvious he is not interested in improving the lot of poor children; he just wants to offer red meat to his beastly base, which gets off on disparaging minorities and the poor.

Disgruntled wants to know: With the death of Martina Correia, the sister of Troy Davis, who fought to save him from execution by the state of Georgia as she battled breast cancer, the campaign to end the death penalty has lost a dedicated warrior. She will be missed by the surviving members of her family and people around the world who came to love her for her commitment and dedication to saving Troy and ending an inhumane practice that has been abolished in most of the civilized world. Opponents of capital punishment continue to wonder at the silence of President Obama. When will he address this issue and the mass incarceration of millions that make the US look more like a police state than the world's greatest democracy?

Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls

Email www.commondreams.org...Excerpt quoting Robert Scheer..."Citigroup off the hook for a pittance in fines in return for closing cases involving immense corruption on the part of the bankers, who would not have to admit guilt for their crimes. And crimes they clearly are, far beyond the scope of pitching a tent in a public park. As Judge Rakoff stated, the Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Citigroup with "a substantial securities fraud" in the sale of a billion dollars' worth of toxic securities that were designed to fail and which the bank had bet against. Rakoff, who has handled a number of these cases, complained that Citigroup, like the other major banks, is a recidivist. Citigroup had already paid fines for four similar scams. The judge observed that "although this would appear tantamount to an allegation of knowing and fraudulent intent, the SEC, for reasons of its own, chose to charge Citigroup only with negligence" despite the far more serious charges called for in securities law. The failure of the SEC or any other government agency to hold the banks accountable provides the essential justification for citizen action of the sort the Occupy movement has offered."

Email www.truthdig.com...Fukushima Fuel Rods May Have Completely Melted...By Justin McCurry...Fuel rods inside one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have completely melted and bored most of the way through a concrete floor, the reactor's last line of defense before its steel outer casing, the plant's operator said. Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) said in a report that fuel inside reactor No 1 appeared to have dropped through its inner pressure vessel and into the outer containment vessel, indicating that the accident was more severe than first thought. The revelation that the plant may have narrowly averted a disastrous "China syndrome" scenario comes days after reports that the company had dismissed a 2008 warning that the plant was inadequately prepared to resist a tsunami. Tepco revised its view of the damage inside the No 1 reactor - one of three that suffered meltdown soon after the 11 March disaster - after running a new simulation of the accident. It would not comment on the exact position of the molten fuel, or on how much of it is exposed to water being pumped in to cool the reactor. More than nine months into the crisis, workers are still unable to gauge the damage directly because of dangerously high levels of radiation inside the reactor building.