A Tear In The Matrix/A Disturbance In The Force-- And Conservatives Find The Perfect Time To Cut Off Funding For Tsunami Preparedness

I want to tell you how soundly I sleep. When I wake up in the morning, my bedding is completely undisturbed. I can make my bed with one finger. Always. Friday, I bolted upright at 1am and rushed down to my computer. I don't know what made that happen. It was a first.


I saw the news reports on the catastrophe in Japan. I sent out a few tweets... like the ones above. If you follow DWT with any regularity-- or my Facebook page or Twitter feed-- you know I don't hesitate to ruffle feathers. I've been holding powerful figures to task for years-- and not just easy targets like Bush, Limbaugh, Rove, Emanuel, Boehner, Palin, Lieberman and Beck but even occasionally misguided allies like Obama, Reid, Feingold or... Emily's List and Michael Moore (was I ever wrong on the Moore front). But I never got a reaction like the one I got yesterday: scores of tweets-- many from engineers (remember them from college?)-- attacking me for reporting the news about Japan's nuclear reactor problems. Arturo Mirando Bencomo's, WebSquirrel's and PolPotWasLeftie's-- never heard of them either-- were typical:




Hopefully they'll unfollow me quickly because they're not part of any discussion I'm in. I have no doubt that the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl was very different from the ones at Fukushima and the other Japanese sites-- and different from the ones at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. And I'm sure a bunch of physicists and engineers could have a rip-roarin' debate about containment vessels. Let me know the results-- but keep it to 145 characters. My problem is something else-- something unfortunately engineers don't consider-- the reason, for example, why technological advancement's outpacing mankind's moral advancement has our species, if not the planet-- for the first time ever-- on the precipice of extinction.

Nuclear energy may be very profitable for the companies involved in generating it, especially when it's subsidized by the politicians the companies pay off, but that doesn't make it viable. And handing out iodide pills isn't a satisfactory answer.

News reports from Japan indicate that officials there are preparing to distribute iodide pills to citizens in order to prevent certain types of radiation sickness should a nuclear meltdown occur.

If the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, or any of the others that have been damaged after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, does indeed melt down, several types of radioactive materials could be expelled into the environment. Cesium-137 and strontium-90 present long-term environmental hazards and can be absorbed throughout the body, particularly bones. Plutonium-239 exposure often leads to lung cancer, and it has a half-life of 24,000 years, so it would be around for a long, long time. (A half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of the radioactive isotopes in a substance to decay.)

But one of the most dangerous materials that could come out of the reactor is iodine-131. Iodine has a relatively short half-life of about a week, but it can do a lot of damage in that time. It will most likely escape in gas form, which makes it easy to pick up, and the body rapidly funnels it to the thyroid, where it can accumulate and cause cancer in a relatively short amount of time.

Another tweet:


In their mad rush to capitalize on the gross and mostly manipulated ignorance behind teabaggery-- the decade's Know Nothing movement-- the Republican Party is trying to take an ax to the ability of government to function as a counterbalance to overwhelming corporate power. The Democrats are conflicted and torn since many-- if not most-- of them are as complicit in the corporate takeover as the Republicans are. But this weekend nothing particularly stands out as grotesquely as the Republicans-- many of whom tweeted their prayers to the victims of the Japan catastrophe-- trying to gut tsunami preparedness from the budget. Friday Sam Stein pulled back the covers at HuffPo:

Tucked into the House Republican continuing resolution are provisions cutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including the National Weather Service, as well as humanitarian and foreign aid.

Presented as part of a larger deficit reduction package, each cut could be pitched as tough-choice, belt-tightening on behalf of the GOP. But advocates for protecting those funds pointed to the crisis in Japan as evidence that without the money, disaster preparedness and relief would suffer.

"These are very closely related," National Weather Service Employees Organization President Dan Sobien told The Huffington Post with respect to the budget cuts and the tsunami. "The National Weather Service has the responsibility of warning about tsunami's also. It is true that there is no plan to not fund the tsunami buoys. Everyone knows you just can't do that. Still if those [House] cuts go through there will be furloughs at both of the tsunami warning centers that protect the whole country and, in fact, the whole world."

The House full-year continuing resolution, which has not passed the Senate, would indeed make steep cuts to several programs and functions that would serve in a response to natural disasters (not just tsunamis) home and abroad. According to Sobien, the bill cuts $126 million from the budget of the NWS. Since, however, the cuts are being enacted over a six-month period (the length of the continuing resolution) as opposed to over the course of a full year, the effect would be roughly double.

As for NOAA, the House GOP cuts are even deeper. The House spending bill is roughly $450 million below the president's 2011 budget requests. The Senate Democratic bill would be $110 million below that request. The White House-allied Center for American Progress, argued that the House spending bill would actually cut $1.2 billion from the president's budget requests, likely by taking into account that the bill does not provide NOAA the funding increase requested for the Joint Polar Satellite System.

A request to comment from the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee was not immediately returned.

Either way, the lower funding levels would force major institutional readjustments. An internal analysis put together by the House Democratic Finance committee before the tsunami struck, argued that such cuts "could result in the closure of up to 12 forecast offices that safeguard American lives and property. Each forecast office issues forecasts and warnings to an average population of 2.5 million people."

The proposed cut to the Operation, Research, and Facilities account would also result in a 21 day furlough of NOAA's employees.

Do Republicans want to kill us? They either do or they don't; that isn't the point. What they want is that their wealthy campaign donors-- the corporate managers and wealthy businessmen who finance their careers, their status in society and their self esteem-- can continue paying almost no taxes and avoid sharing in the sacrifice of the rest of us-- like welfare queens, teachers, firemen and trash collectors. That's the essence of conservatism, 2011. That and an ability to evade all regulation and societal responsibilities in the quest for private profit. (Today's Wall Street Journal has been quick to reassure investors that Japan's taxpayers will bear all liabilities and costs of the disaster, rather than the private companies that profited from the facilities.)