Feel Safe, Very Safe

Oxford, England -- The first headline that greeted me here, three-quarters of the world away from Japan, was that radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been measured here. The second was that the progressive half of Britain's push-me, pull-you coalition government, in the form of Liberal Democrat leader Nicholas Clegg, had uttered out loud what many are thinking: after the Japanese catastrophe, it will be almost impossible for democratic societies to replace their existing nuclear power plants, much less increase their nuclear reliance.

Clegg's point was simple: If we make nuclear plants safer, as Japan has shown we must, then nukes make even less economic sense and cannot go forward without huge subsidies. And Clegg's insistence that the British taxpayers will NOT bail-out nuclear power is a strong signal and warning to investors, even though the French nuclear company EDF promptly challenged Clegg's arithmetic.

Meanwhile, the radioactive U.S. spin machine churns its way glowingly along. In Sunday's papers, America's poster child for an almost nuclear catastrophe, T.V.A.'s Browns Ferry nuclear plant, invited journalists in to see how much safer our plants are than Japan's. The reporters were shown a lot of real but very small differences between Browns Ferry and its Japanese twins. We have strobe lights! And little carts carrying batteries to power measuring devices! "They're like a backup to the backup," said Keith J. Polson, T.V.A.'s vice president for the Browns Ferry site. "That's what we think the Japanese didn't have."

What Polson and the papers -- including the New York Times -- didn't tell us about are the backups Browns Ferry doesn't have. On Thanksgiving Day 2003, for example, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided that Browns Ferry didn't need a redundant backup electrical system. So if another fire occurs, like the one that almost melted it down in 1975, the plant will be shut down by some superhero employee running through the flames, rather than by a fail-safe backup technical system. Nor did the reporters touring the plant receive the information that, during a recent test of equipment at Browns Ferry, a critical water valve in the emergency core cooling system failed to work, although the plant's management had informed the NRC about the potential risk.

At least Browns Ferry has decent electrical cable -- something the NRC decided would be simply too expensive at New York's Indian Point plant, a piece of corner-cutting which could easily destroy New York City. Strobe lights are cheap. Decent electrical cable costs a little more. A backup electrical system is a significant investment.

New York City? Priceless.

Tell the NRC. Tell the New York Times. Tell your representatives and senators. Tell the president.

You can count. Even if they can't.

Oh My Darling Party Line

Washington, D.C. -- A wonderful parody of "My Darling Clementine" once made fun of how the Communist Party's leadership flip-flopped at a moment's notice to adhere to the party line as established in Moscow. Its refrain ran

Oh my darling, Oh my darling,
Oh my darling party line.
Oh, I never will desert you
Cause I love this life of mine.

To the best of my knowledge, the Tea Party/Koch Oil caucus has not yet actually conducted purge trials complete with executions for Republicans who fail to adjust their positions with every shift of the political winds. But it's clear that the reactionary right is in the process of developing its own full-scale party line, with Fox News playing the role of Pravda. In fact, the current Republican Party leadership is beginning in many ways to behave like the old Communists, with a disciplined center and a bunch of factions splitting off at the extremes in the name of purity.

The most spectacular of these party line flip-flops of course, was over a no-fly zone in Libya. Gingrich and Fox were for it until Obama actually did it -- at which point they were against it. Gingrich went so far as to assert that he had never really been for it, he had just been dealing with the unavoidable problems created by Obama publicly urging Qaddafi to go.

Gingrich is not alone. The two Republicans chairing the key foreign policy committee in the House -- Buck McKeon of the House Armed Services Committee, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, also flip-flopped.

A broad swath of Republicans, led by Gingrich, have of course abandoned their previous commitments to action on global warming and support for cap-and-trade -- but these switches at least took place over the course of months, not weeks. It is virtually instantaneous flip-flopping in unison, combined with a remarkable capacity for saying that black is white, that is the real hallmark of a party-line-governed movement.

Oh Well, What's a Poor Canadian Corporation To Do?

San Francisco -- President Obama's step-father's experience at the hands of an American-backed dictator in Indonesia gave him a chilling view into how empire looks from the receiving end. His visit this week to El Salvador gives him a chance to do something about it.

Candidate Obama campaigned in favor of reforming America's trade agreements with Latin America--the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)--because both are one-sided and favor predatory business practices over worker rights and environmental protection. Sometimes as president, as in his path-breaking Cairo speech, he seems to be charting a new path. But at other times he seems a prisoner of his predecessors, saying that reforms would have to wait until the economic crisis had passed.

El Salvador demonstrates why reform cannot wait. After allowing foreign mining, logging, and agribusiness companies to devastate its landscape for decades, the Salvadorean government has finally put its foot down: It suspended permits issued to a Canadian mining company because its operations would take scarce water supplies from a community and because the cyanide used in the gold mining might contaminate the area's entire aquifer. (The mining company's defense was that while cyanide perhaps be toxic, the human body is able to "assimilate" it, since it occurs in natural form in foods like cassava, grapes and almonds.)

Pacific Rim, the Canadian company that had proposed the mining operation in one of El Salvador's poorest regions, wasn't going to let this pass. It lacked legal recourse under Canadian trade agreements, so it shed the maple leaf for the stars and stripes, moving one of its subsidiaries from the Cayman Islands to Nevada, thereby entitling it to status as a "U.S. investor." As such, it then sued El Salvador for $100 million. Under CAFTA, U.S. companies have the right to challenge the environmental standards set by Central American nations. (An ordinary citizen of the Cayman Islands might have a hard time getting a green card, but for a mining company--hey, no problem.) Pacific Rim's argument for being entitled to $100 million in damages is that it filled out its application correctly--and that's all the environmental protection El Salvador is entitled to!

Pacific Rim is not relying solely on CAFTA; it's also pushing its right wing allies in the Salvadorean parliament to take away the government's authority to deny mining permits. Under the new law proposed by Pacific Rim, a commission would be established which could give mining concessions for 46 years--during which time CAFTA would protect mining companies from any further environmental regulation.

Obama has to decide where he stands. El Salvador's bishops oppose Pacific Rim, and 19 Democratic members of Congress and more than 140 organizations including the Sierra Club have asked the President to defend El Salvador in the Pacific Rim case--and to use this outrage as a template for reform of the "investor rights" provisions in CAFTA, NAFTA, and other pending U.S. trade agreements.

I hope the President tells his trade staff to read his campaign pledges--and pages 44-45 of Dreams From My Father. That would remind them that this President uniquely understands what a foreign policy that puts greed over decency means to people on the other side of the equation.