So what do you do when financial analysts are warning that housing prices are headed for a "triple dip", the second largest Swiss Bank (Credit Suisse) announces it's piling 1,500 additional job cuts - many from the US - on top of its previously announced 2,000 (after a 12 per cent increase in profits this past quarter) and the federal government just sued one of the nation's largest privately held mortgage brokers (Allied Home Mortgage) for a decade of "fraudulent lending practices that forced thousands of Americans to lose their homes."

Seriously, could the economic Big Brains who think it's a good idea to take money out of people's pockets via spending cuts, while rejecting increased spending on our nation's crashing infrastructure, try punching "Japan" and "lost decade" into the Google machine? Or perhaps just admit their relationship to understood economics is like Kim Kardashian's marriage - shallow, somewhat entertaining, but ultimately embarrassing.

These right-wing members of Congress and inhabitants of the "pro-market," think-tank-welfare world, with their flip reaction the ongoing economic crisis, have begun to remind me of an exchange between John Travolta (trying to steal and sell nuclear weapons) and Christian Slater (trying to stop him) in the movie Broken Arrow. Slater's character says to Travolta's: "You're out of your mind," to which Travolta replies - while wearing a spooky Herman Cain-esque, I-just-gave-a-massage-to-my-secretary smile - "Yeah, ain't it cool."

Apparently, the only stimulant conservatives favour is whatever Rick Perry was mainlining during his speech in New Hampshire the other night.

Infrastructure work creates jobs

What's so maddening, however, is that the answer is quite clear to sane people and non-shills-long-term infrastructure projects that, in the near term, provide jobs, and further out will provide ... jobs. And increased productivity. Ever hear of those train things or the internet? Yeah, well, people are more productive when they're faster and stuff.

Part of what's so frustrating is that not only was President Obama's stimulus bill too small by half, which top economists predicted before it passed (but yay, Susan Collins liked it!). But the administration didn't even defend it, which took something the Congressional Budget Office says saved up to 3.6 million jobs - and allowed it to be demonized by politically expedient grifters playing games.

These very same economists who were right about the stimulus are now clamouring for more infrastructure spending. Paul Krugman, who has been banging this drum for a while, pointed out in a recent piece how the very same crowd that flips out over any government spending on, for lack of a better phrase, people who can't afford his and hers dancing water fountains from Neiman Marcus as a stocking-stuffer, continually push for spending for defence contractors without a worry in the world about the budget. Why? Because these hypocritical dunderheads say "such cuts would destroy jobs."

So obviously the deficit hysteria is simply that, a pretend crisis to hide an ideology gunning for its greatest achievement to be reintroducing the elderly to the joys of the appetising and eminently satisfying Purina dinner.

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The Washington Post reports the nuclear crisis in Japan has escalated. German TV is reporting there is now partial meltdown in the open air, and the Japanese people are taking one shock after another:

TOKYO — Japanese authorities raised Tuesday their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Officials with Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission reclassified the ongoing emergency from level 5, an “accident with off-site risk,” to level 7, a “major accident.” The reassessment comes at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency says the plant is showing “early signs of recovery” but still in a critical condition.

The plant’s debilitated reactors face constant threat of strong aftershocks, and the latest on Tuesday morning — a 6.2-magnitude temblor — caused a brief fire at a water sampling facility near Daiichi’s No. 4 reactor. The Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the power plant, said that the critical process used to cool the hot fuel rods had not been interrupted, and radiation levels showed no signs of change.

A level 7 accident, according to the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, is typified by a “major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects.”

[...] Radiation leaking from Fukushima Daiichi amounts to about 10 percent of that from the Chernobyl accident, a Nuclear Safety Commission official, who was not named, said on national television.

[...] According to the Kyodo news agency, Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission reported Monday that the plant, at one point after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, had been releasing 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactivity per hour. The report did not specify when those radiation readings occurred. A release of tens of thousands of terabecquerels per hour, though, correspondents with the radiation leakage level that the IAEA uses as a minimum benchmark for a level 7 accident.

“This corresponds to a large fraction of the core inventory of a power reactor, typically involving a mixture of short- and long-lived radionuclides,” an IAEA document says. “With such a release, stochastic health effects over a wide area, perhaps involving more than one country, are expected.”

And of course, we are still avoiding the world "meltdown" --- although, according to Rep. Ed Markey, the nuclear core has already melted through the reactor vessel.

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Credit: CNN

Second Earthquake in Japan

Japan was rocked again by a second earthquake, this one measuring between 7.1 and 7.4 and the Japanese government has issued another Tsunami warning.

A powerful earthquake struck Japan on Thursday, triggering a tsunami warning for one prefecture and advisories in other prefectures.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said the quake was a magnitude of 7.4. The U.S. Geological Survey said it was 7.1. There were no reports of casualties from anywhere in the earthquake zone, the National Police Agency said.

Workers evacuated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the quake, the Tokyo Electric Power Company said. Tokyo Electric said it has communication with the plant and the power is still on there. There were no immediate reports of damage, it said.

The quake's epicenter was off the coast of Miyagi in northeastern Japan, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

Living through two big earthquakes myself, I know aftershocks are very, very scary after you've been hit and Japan has had a tremendous number of those following the 9.0 monster quake, but to then get hit again so soon has to have shaken up the psyche of the Japanese people even more. Let's hope nothing more happened to the Fukushima reactors.

And then we get this news from the NRC:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission thinks the reactor in unit 2 of Japan’s disabled power plant got so hot it “probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel,” U.S. Representative Edward Markey said.

Martin Virgilio, the agency’s deputy director for reactor and preparedness programs, told reporters after a House hearing today that the commission doesn’t think the “core has breached,” which would let radiation escape. The commission gets reports several times a day from agency staff in Japan and none mentioned a breach, he said.

The pressure vessel is one line of defense preventing a larger radiation leak from Fukushima Dai-Ichi’s crippled reactors, where workers have sought to reconnect power to provide a steady supply of water.

“After you lose the vessel, then you are down to one final barrier, that’s the containment,” Virgilio told reporters.

Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, has pressed for new safety regulations in response to the crisis in Japan, triggered by the 9-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami on March 11. Virgilio said workers have yet to stabilize the damaged facility.

Giselle Barry, a spokeswoman for Markey, said information on the status of the unit 2 reactor came from correspondence between his staff and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Markey and Virgilio spoke at a House Energy oversight and investigations subcommittee hearing today on the Japan crisis.
--
Virgilio said he wasn’t aware of an agency report, cited by the New York Times, that said water used to keep fuel from overheating at the Japanese plant makes containment vessels more vulnerable to rupture amid aftershocks that have rattled the region since March 11.

The report raises the possibility of explosions inside containment structures from the release of hydrogen and oxygen in the seawater pumped into the reactors, according to the Times. The assessment doesn’t speculate on the risk of new explosions or damage from an aftershock, events that may lead to a more serious release of radiation from the nuclear core, the newspaper reported.

The Japanese people don't believe anything TEPCO is saying to them and have lodged over 40,000 complaints and neither do I. I've been following this pretty closely and all I can tell you is that I have ordered some Potasium Iodine pills.

The reporting by the MSM has been very flaccid on the Japanese nuclear tragedy because of politics. Japan is making it up as they go along. Just pumping seawater into the reactor is not going to work. I'll have more on this soon..

The first good news out of this in a while:

Working overnight into Sunday, engineers have successfully restored power to cooling pumps in two reactors at the disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the first genuinely hopeful sign in the week-long battle to prevent a full-scale meltdown at any of the six reactors at the site.

Although power has so far been restored only at reactor buildings 5 and 6, which were not considered a particular threat, that success suggests that workers are finally beginning to make some headway in their effort to prevent more radiation from escaping the plant.

The two reactors had been shut down at the time the magnitude 9 earthquake struck a week ago, but spent fuel rods in an upper level of the reactor buildings were still generating heat and required cooling. When electricity at the site was lost and the tsunami damaged backup generators, the pools holding the fuel rods began to grow warmer.

Officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the plant, said water in the no. 5 pool had already cooled by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit since the cooling pumps had started working.

Engineers said they hoped to have the power connected to the remaining reactor buildings sometime Sunday or early Monday.

But now there's radiation in the food and water supply:

Although Japan's Health Ministry said the levels were not immediately harmful to humans, the discovery of higher than normal radioactivity in batches of milk and spinach near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was almost certain to stir new angst among a Japanese public already weary from earthquake aftershocks, blackouts and fears of a complete nuclear meltdown.

That announcement was followed by reports late Saturday that traces of radioactive iodine were found in tap water in Tokyo and other parts of the country.

"This is the expected next development," said Dr. Glenn D. Braunstein, chairman of the department of medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, referring to the tainted foods. After the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986, he said, a major cause of the thyroid disease suffered by children came from consumption of contaminated food.

"There are two routes to radiation exposure: One is breathing it in, and the other is swallowing it through foodstuffs," he said. Other experts warned that contamination may also turn up in fish, a staple of the Japanese diet.

You don't suppose they're going to start acting like those brown people in New Orleans, are they?

With petrol running low, delivery trucks are struggling to get supplies to those hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. And as provisions decline, tension rises. Al Jazeera's Steve Chao reports from Morioka.

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This video, shot in real time as the tsunami rolled into Sendai, is amazing. There's not much to add to it other than amazement that anyone had the presence of mind to keep the video on while running from a wall of water. If you don't get chills when they're in the stairwell, well...I don't believe you. I think you did get chills.

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Boy, am I glad Ed Schultz dealt with this. It's been a Fox theme since yesterday, beginning on Megyn Kelly's show and continuing on all the way through tonight's O'Reilly Factor. It goes like this: Unlike here after Katrina, and the Haiti and Chile earthquakes (translate that to where black people and Hispanics live), there has been no looting in Japan. Glenn Beck took it out to an extreme on his show today and then came on O'Reilly to tell everyone how noble the Japanese are for not looting after a disaster.

Of course, the whole idea of "looting" supposes that there is a) anything left after a disaster to take; and b) those who take are doing so with the motive of enriching themselves in some way, which makes no sense in areas where dire need supplants more banal motives. The areas most heavily affected by the earthquake were virtually destroyed by the tsunami. When ships sit on top of buildings and homes are reduced to rubble, there isn't much left to "loot." What's left behind is need and desperation.

But if you really want to understand why you're not seeing a whole lot of stories about looting in Japan, Slate has an excellent article explaining Japanese culture and society that will enlighten you.

There's a race-related overtone that's really insidious here, with Beck insinuating that the Japanese people are somehow superior to Americans, Haitians and Chileans, more noble. More good. It's quite subtle, but Ed sees it too. He also completely unwraps the idea of "no looting" and indeed, the idea of looting at all.

Ed points out there is looting going on in Japan. But is it looting when there's deep, desperate need? As Ed points out, "What is looting, when you're trying to survive?"

It's the framing that I noticed and also what Ed picked up on.

See, it always comes back to Beck's vision of America. With Barack Obama as President, America just isn't what it should be. We don't have respect for our fellow man, we don't even have respect for where we live? Glenn Beck is using false information about looting in Japan to say America isn't good enough?

Let's remind Beck about the volunteers who went to the Gulf Coast to help clean up the BP oil spill. We should also remind him about the people who helped rescue their fellow man from the flood waters of Katrina. And Beck, let's not forget about the first responders who ran in to the twin towers back on September 11th, 2001. Let's remind him that yes, there are looters in America and yes, there are looters in Japan, but no matter what country they're from, people in crisis do their best to stick together, to help one another, and to survive. Survive.

Also, what IS up with that fake Oval office set Beck's pontificating from? Is this how Fox plans to rehabilitate him? Take away the chalkboard and put him in a big desk flanked with flags? It's offensive. Tonight Bill O'Reilly referred to him as a "Fox News Analyst." A Fox News analyst? Really?

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And now, for a more realistic assessment of the situation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant than what you'll hear on Fox News, here's physicist Michio Kaku this morning on Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos, talking about the lame effort to pour water on the melting reactor cores from helicopters:

KAKU: It's like a squirt gun, using a squirt gun against a raging forest fire. They're overwhelmed, they're floundering, they just don't know what to do. They're clueless.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And ironically, U.S. officials are most concerned about the spent fuel in Reactor No. 4 -- that's fuel that had been taken out of the reactors back in November. Now originally, officials thought that it had been out for some time, but this is relatively fresh fuel, which is why they're so concerned.

KAKU: Very concerned. Hollywood likes to focus in on the meltdown, the melted core's exposed uranium. But old fuel is actually more dangerous than the meltdown, because there's more radiation in an unguarded spent-fuel pond than the reactor itself.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So it could ignite, that's the concern?

KAKU: That's right. You could have a fire -- it would be like fireworks -- go off like roman candles. Zirconium will oxidize with air, releasing hydrogen gas. So that when someone lights a cigarette, or lights a light switch, you have a roman candle gas bomb.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And that just makes the rest of the situation that much worse, because no one can get close enough then to try and contain the damage in Reactors 1, 2 and 3. And that's where the longer-term dangers are.

KAKU: That's right. At a certain point, they're going to have to abandon ship, it will be a suicide mission to go in there. The radiation levels are near lethal right now. You're committing suicide to spend large amounts of time there.

On Nightline last night, Kaku warned that "we are very close now to something that is even bigger than Chernobyl". He explained this morning:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what is the worst case -- if they can't get No. 4 under control, then that leads to further meltdowns. Is an explosion possible, like we saw at Chernobyl?

KAKU: An explosion, or a melt-through -- we're talking about radiation being released into the larger environment. At Chernobyl, it was an uncontrolled release -- 25, 30 percent of the core just shot into the air.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That can't happen here, because it hasn't been active, right?

KAKU: Well, it can happen in the sense you have hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas can ignite -- not just from the containment, but in the vessel itself, and rip the vessel to pieces.

More from ABC News:

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UPDATE: Japan's Prime Minister confirms radiation is spewing from damaged reactors, warning residents to stay inside or risk radiation sickness.

Via Truthout, Greg Palast informs us that TEPCO, the Japanese power company, has a long history of safety violations and coverups -- and they're coming to the Gulf of Mexico to build a nuclear power plant! Can this nightmare get any worse?

I need to speak to you, not as a reporter, but in my former capacity as lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations.

I don't know the law in Japan, so I can't tell you if Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) can plead insanity to the homicides about to happen.

But what will Obama plead? The administration, just months ago, asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors to be built and operated on the Gulf Coast of Texas - by TEPCO and local partners. As if the Gulf hasn't suffered enough. Here are the facts about TEPCO and the industry you haven't heard on CNN:

The failure of emergency systems at Japan's nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field.

Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called "SQ" or "Seismic Qualification." That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from al-Qaeda.

The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie. The industry does it all the time. The government team I worked with caught them once, in 1988, at the Shoreham plant in New York. Correcting the SQ problem at Shoreham would have cost a cool billion, so engineers were told to change the tests from "failed" to "passed."

The company that put in the false safety report? Stone & Webster, now the nuclear unit of Shaw Construction, which will work with TEPCO to build the Texas plant. Lord help us.

There's more.

Last night, I heard CNN reporters repeat the official line that the tsunami disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactors, implying that water unexpectedly got into the diesel generators that run the pumps.

These safety backup systems are the "EDGs" in nuke-speak: Emergency Diesel Generators. That they didn't work in an emergency is like a fire department telling us they couldn't save a building because "it was on fire."

Sounds too much like anti-nuke propaganda? The Guardian doesn't have any reassuring news, either:

Nuclear experts have thrown doubt on the accuracy of official information issued about the Fukushima nuclear accident, saying that it followed a pattern of secrecy and cover-ups employed in other nuclear accidents. "It's impossible to get any radiation readings," said John Large, an independent nuclear engineer who has worked for the UK government and been commissioned to report on the accident for Greenpeace International.

"The actions of the Japanese government are completely contrary to their words. They have evacuated 180,000 people but say there is no radiation. They are certain to have readings but we are being told nothing." He said a radiation release was suspected "but at the moment it is impossible to know. It was the same at Chernobyl, where they said there was a bit of a problem and only later did the full extent emerge."

According to some reports, 17 helicopter crewmen helping in rescue efforts were contaminated with low-level radiation, but Japanese officials declined to comment.

The country's government has previously been accused of covering up nuclear accidents and hampering the development of alternative energy.

In a newly released diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks, politician Taro Kono, a high-profile member of Japan's lower house, tells US diplomats that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry – the Japanese government department responsible for nuclear energy – has been "covering up nuclear accidents and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry".

[...] "What we are seeing follows a clear pattern of secrecy and denial," said Paul Dorfman, co-secretary to the Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters, a UK government advisory committee disbanded in 2004.

"The Japanese government has always tended to underplay accidents. At the moment the Japanese claims of safety are not to be believed by anyone. The health effects of what has happened so far are imponderable. The reality is we just do not know. There is profound uncertainty about the impact of the accident."

Imagine what it must be like to be in Japan right now: A massive earthquake, a tsunami, two explosions at nuclear power plants and now, even a volcano. It's going to take a very long time for those poor people to dig out from these disasters, and apparently a very long time before they can stop worrying about radiation:

WASHINGTON — As the scale of Japan’s nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the United States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months.

The emergency flooding of two stricken reactors with seawater and the resulting steam releases are a desperate step intended to avoid a much bigger problem: a full meltdown of the nuclear cores in two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. On Monday, an explosion blew the roof off the second reactor, not damaging the core, officials said, but presumably leaking more radiation.

So far, Japanese officials have said the melting of the nuclear cores in the two plants is assumed to be “partial,” and the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest.

But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates — still being analyzed, but presumed to include cesium-137 and iodine-121 — suggesting widening environmental contamination.

In a country where memories of a nuclear horror of a different sort in the last days of World War II weigh heavily on the national psyche and national politics, the impact of continued venting of long-lasting radioactivity from the plants is hard to overstate.

Japanese reactor operators now have little choice but to periodically release radioactive steam as part of an emergency cooling process for the fuel of the stricken reactors that may continue for a year or more even after fission has stopped. The plant’s operator must constantly try to flood the reactors with seawater, then release the resulting radioactive steam into the atmosphere, several experts familiar with the design of the Daiichi facility said.

That suggests that the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated may not be able to return to their homes for a considerable period, and that shifts in the wind could blow radioactive materials toward Japanese cities rather than out to sea.