Factors leading to the end of the world come to our small town

This area in Los Alamos, N.M., is going to be redeveloped into a shopping center. Outside of new asphalt, it will probably look a lot like it does right now.

Los Alamos, New Mexico, appeared on the scene in 1943 when the military needed a really isolated place to assemble a bunch of really smart scientists to build a really big bomb that would end a really bad war. A few months later they built the Atomic Bomb and dropped it on Japan. That was that.

After the end of World War II, the military planned to close down Los Alamos and move everyone out, but it didn’t happen. Instead, small tracts of housing popped up one-by-one as Los Alamos scientists conquered the mud and isolation that made the community a perfect location during the war to carry out a top-secret project. Dirt became streets and forests became neighborhoods. People stayed in Los Alamos because they liked the self-sufficiency it demanded.

For the past six decades, the Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb has remained a tiny town located well off the main roads of rural New Mexico. The Los Alamos National Laboratory continues as the only community industry, though fewer than half the brainiacs who work there live in the town—lured to Los Alamos instead of nearby Santa Fe because of Los Alamos’ relative isolation from “normal” community issues like crime, over-crowdedness and artificial lighting. The population of Los Alamos stopped growing about 30 years ago. About 18,000 call this place their home.

As strange as it might seem, Los Alamos harbors one of the greatest concentrations of millionaires in the Western United States. The relatively high salaries paid at the Laboratory, combined with an almost pathological culture of frugality and a prevailing mindset for hoarding wealth based on the uneasy realization that funding for Los Alamos National Laboratory could instantly cease at the whim of Congress, are among the many peculiar reasons why Los Alamos remains an island of affluence in an otherwise poor state.

During the past 20 years the retail and service sector of Los Alamos has dried up. A community that once had a bustling downtown area packed with busy storefronts, Los Alamos is now distinguished by empty shopping areas decorated with “For Lease” signs hanging in plate-glass windows of decrepit properties. Retail in Los Alamos has been boiled down to a single grocery store, a couple of small department stores, a dozen restaurants that provide lunchtime solace to the daily crowd of Los Alamos National Laboratory workers, a couple of coffee shops and not much else. A triumvirate of local landlords control most of the downtown property, and rents remain high due to scarcity of available land.

Ghost Town

Once the day’s work ends at LANL, the community of Los Alamos becomes a ghost town. Restaurants are shuttered by 8 p.m. People largely stay indoors after dark. Most nights in Los Alamos are so quiet that you can hear the hum of electric transformers or the sound of traffic across town if you try.

Residents procure their necessities from the local supermarket, from Internet shopping sprees or during weekly trips out of town to nearby Santa Fe or not-so-nearby Albuquerque. Community leaders once speculated that 80 cents of every retail dollar spent by Los Alamos residents was spent out of town. Many long-time residents of Los Alamos have come to understand that while Los Alamos lacks many shopping opportunities, the community is rich with recreational amenities and that “small town feel” that has been pushed out of so many other communities that traded open space for shopping centers and housing developments. Many people choose to live in Los Alamos because the community has remained free of the cancer of sprawl and its unpleasant side effects.

Recently, however, a new breed has moved to Los Alamos. Former big-city dwellers afflicted with the ennui of affluence have moved into the community like the flocks of Texas blackbirds that have been blown in on the Winds of Change. Accustomed to the instant gratification that comes with shopping at Macy’s or WalMart, and the standardized taste of the corporate clagg served up at Red Robbin and Applebee’s, these newcomers have undertaken a concerted mission to morph the community of Los Alamos into the urban centers from which they fled, while still striving to retain the community’s “Small-Town Feel.”

This unsettled outside element began petitioning local leaders to make Los Alamos more like other places and less like itself. The movement gained serious momentum about seven years ago. An idea settled into the local zeitgeist: If the local government would subsidize a local shopping center, then businesses might come to Los Alamos.

The Pitchmen and Financiers rallied together to present a vision of Los Alamos with a new “Public-Private” partnership that would bring a shiny new shopping mall to the edge of town—a mall with a big-box anchor store, ice cream parlors, fashion stores, pet stores, exciting new national-chain restaurants, community gathering places, bandstands! You name it, the new shopping center would have it! Los Alamos residents were told they were limited only by their dreams! Increased shopping, decreased erectile dysfunction. We could have it all!

The community spent almost $80 million to clear a plot of community land to make space ready for the Atomic City’s new commerce field of dreams. The shopping experiences that had been as elusive to modern-day Los Alamos residents as the idea of a sustained nuclear chain reaction had been to scientists during the early phases of the Manhattan Project were suddenly a possibility. “If we build it, they will come,” said the voice inside the community’s collective unconscious. “We conquered the atom, now we can conquer the market and a lack of demand.”

Then reality hit.

The developer that had made such grand promises bowed out of the project, blaming the economic downturn for its misfortune, even though a steady stream of retail gurus had paraded through the town and made the matter-of-fact observation that the size of Los Alamos’ population severely limited the community’s retail options. Despite the size of the wallets in Los Alamos, the community’s modest size would not support the pedigree of stores Los Alamos’ new population was envisioning.

Unwilling to disappoint its citizens, the local elected officials rejected reality and pressed forward, promising the community that it would get the shopping center it deserved. A few years later, and the leaders unveiled the plan. The giant tract of land at the edge of the town would become a Smith’s Marketplace—a super-sized version of the community’s existing grocery store. It would sit in a sea of asphalt just down the road from where Manhattan Project scientists had worked with the first plutonium the world had ever known.

Most members of the community were underwhelmed or outright horrified that after spending seven years and nearly $100 million, our community was going to move its only grocery store across the street into undeveloped land, while at the same time providing the grocery store with assurances formalized within the lease agreement that nothing anywhere nearby would compete with the grocery store.

Los Alamos, New Mexico, the “smartest,” richest community in the West was poised to provide the Kroger Corp. with a 75-year monopoly in its quest for retail diversity. Those bold enough to question the arrangement were branded as “naysayers” and negative elements of the community. Dissent was chastised; agreement encouraged.

Weep for the Future

At the meeting before the local elected officials to approve the property lease, women approached the podium and literally begged community leaders to move forward with the new Smith’s Marketplace. Supporters of the project explained how difficult it was to obtain basic goods and services in Los Alamos, even though people had been doing it for six decades. Several women wept outright. The local banker smiled. The representative from Kroger Corp. declined to go into specifics about the store’s plans for the community. Tears dripped onto the podium at the local county council meeting, immortalizing shopping angst in the form of tiny salt stains that the janitorial staff would later wipe away after the town had once again gone to sleep.

I was always told that tears were shed when you lost a loved one or when you heard about a small girl being kidnapped and taken away from her parents. You shed a tear when you hear that rape is used as an act of control and punishment during war. You cry when a species goes extinct or when you see a polar bear drowning because its habitat has melted due to an abundance of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Weep for the world our future generations will inhabit or never get to inhabit because our own greed and waste will render us extinct.

But don’t weep because you have too much money and not enough retail opportunities on which to spend it.

Weep over a system that allows some people to spend $16 million on a birthday party. Weep when thousands of pounds of meat and vegetables are thrown in the garbage each night after the evening meal, while just down the road someone doesn’t have enough to feed his or her family.

Don’t weep because you don’t have enough shopping.

Weep that there is enough plastic garbage swirling in the Pacific Ocean that it can be seen from space. Weep that Americans are so fat that diabetes has become a national epidemic. Weep that our obsession with obtaining Cheap Chinese Junk is moving our nation into Third-World status.

But don’t weep because they might not have a tablecloth in the color you prefer at the local grocery store.

For six decades, Los Alamos, New Mexico, has remained largely isolated from the problems the rest of the world experiences on a day-to-day basis. But that changed on February 1, 2012, when the community decided to have taxpayer-subsidized shopping. The tracks of the tears shed recently before Los Alamos’ City Fathers indicate that Los Alamos is about to become just like anyplace else.

Now that is something worth weeping about.

Manufacturing Mitt

A long, long time ago, when I was a fledgling politician, I was appointed to a post that the political bosses thought would be a good fit for an exuberant young novice like me. As an eager simpleton chock full of the guileless assumption that politicians became politicians out of a selfless desire to make things better for others, I agreed to become the “official” interface between our community’s politicians and our community’s youth.

“Give the youth a voice!” they told me. “Give hope to the next generation! Good luck, son! We’re so glad to have you aboard! God speed!”

I was proud of my new marching orders and I set out effervescently to fulfill the potential of the position I had been given. While my colleagues met with the adult wheeler-dealers of the community and hatched grand schemes intended to enhance the stature of our not-so-grand community while enhancing the wallets of these community “stakeholders,” I had sodas with teenagers and accompanied groups of them to national drug-awareness conferences. My title as “Youth Leader” did little to aggrandize what was essentially an unpaid position as chaperone for the local Parks and Recreation department and helped divert my attention away from the adults’ grand schemes—proposals I might have questioned or made more transparent given my level of cynicism for public-private “partnerships” and my instincts as an investigative reporter.

In essence I had been asked by my political parents to spend Thanksgiving at the Kids’ Table to help keep order and to spare the grown ups from having to endure the prattle of undisciplined young minds. What could it hurt, I thought, the kids need representation, too! What I did not realize until later is that the constituency I was serving was too young to vote and when they’d finally be able to, most of them would have left the community for college or other pursuits.

Nevertheless, I came to respect and enjoy the youth I was working with and I think most of them came to respect, or at least somewhat understand, me as well. I think we came to appreciate in one another that, despite our language and perspective differences, we held a common idealism that wasn’t based on net worth, real estate holdings, campaign contributions or future political ambitions. We believed that by working together we could improve the world for people who didn’t necessarily have the wherewithal to do it themselves. We were working for the greater good, for a common humanity, for a better future. And I think we all really did believe in such charming naiveté because we were too young and unschooled to realize how things really work in the grown-up world.

So what’s all this got to do with Mitt Romney, you may be asking? After all, his name and face head up the top of this post.

Well, along the way, our paths as youth leaders crossed paths with a politician from a nearby community, the center of our state’s political galaxy. This man apparently had gotten the nod from the political patrons to pursue broader political fortunes. This man had existed for perhaps a decade or even longer serving as a lower-level bureaucrat whose futures and fortunes were fueled by grants from non-profit organizations for youth-related causes. The non-profits would provide support to reduce teen addictions to alcohol, nicotine, sex and, of course, drugs, and each year their champion would dole out a good-sized salary for himself to create pamphlets and slogans.

I had originally met this Up-and-Comer while working as a newspaper reporter. He often provided an annual report about his activities to anyone he could get to listen. I became one of his sounding boards—the penance of being a junior reporter. I always thought the reports he provided were fluff, and I could not recall having actually seen a single instance in which this person had interacted directly with youth, despite impressive-sounding bullet points to the contrary in his annual reports. In fact, every time I met with the man for an interview, I got the distinct impression from him that he didn’t even really like other people’s kids very much. He left a while later and I thought I’d never see him again.

Our hero walked back into my life in an unlikely fashion years later at an orchestrated photo-op meeting where he was to interact with some youngsters as part of an image-building campaign to prepare him for a juicy position within whatever administration happened to be occupying the center of our political galaxy at that time. Or perhaps he was preparing a run for elective office. I don’t remember the circumstances exactly, but I do recall his face and its peculiarities well.

As I remember, one of our brightest, most enthusiastic youth leaders had been well prepped and was poised to provide a report or presentation about youth issues in our community. As “Youth Liaison,” I was there to provide legitimacy to the event as the sole local elected official in attendance. One or two ambitious members of the local judiciary might have shown up as well to dutifully fly the Prevention flag, along with several other teens who must have been goaded into attending by parents eager to amass experience points for their children’s college applications. Other than our bright, young spokesperson, none it seemed wanted to be there. Fair enough. Grown-up stuff is boring for kids. Hell, grown-up stuff is boring for grown ups more often than not.

Our visitor entered the room stiffly, a well-rehearsed smile was plastered across his face. His hair and makeup had been expertly coiffed and applied. His wardrobe was impeccable, his teeth brilliant white under the barrage of camera strobes. He walked dutifully over to our young hostess and shook her hand. He grasped it and held on, looking cheerfully into the lens of the official photographer and encouraging our bubbly youth ambassador to do the same.

The photos must have looked impeccable—a majestic, youthful looking up-and-coming Hispano political heir-apparent posing with a woman so wholesomely cute that she would have been kidnapped off the streets and forced to work as host of the Mickey Mouse Club had we lived in Florida.

After a few more snapshots, our hostess went about her presentation while The Up-and-Comer smiled woodenly from across the table. Despite the carved smile, the Up-and-Comer’s eyes betrayed a sense of panic. The edge of his gaze contained the same desperation seen in the eyes of a coyote captured in the merciless jaws of a coil spring trap. But his countenance also betrayed the same slight smear of revulsion that might be exhibited by the father of a newborn who was removing a poopy diaper for the first time—nostrils slightly flared, corners of the mouth curled up into a slight smirk, the chin slammed full-force into the neck, providing the illusion of a single new body part.

To the untrained observer the look might have betrayed a case of the butterflies or the mild empathetic embarrassment a person takes on when witnessing someone giving a less-than-perfect vocal recital. To the keen observer, however, it would have been crystal clear that the Up-and-Comer did not want to be there. It would have been clear that he was simply going through the motions of a compulsory exercise that needed to be performed in order to obtain some type of required credential or credibility.

I had forgotten that look until recently—when I saw C-SPAN footage of Mitt Romney working the crowds at primary events. In watching this modern Heir-Apparent, it is clear that Mitt Romney has no connection whatsoever with the people he is begging for a shot at the Republican nomination. And it’s pretty clear he has no love for any of them either.

The entire air of Mitt Romney reeks of a man who steadfastly believes he has paid his political dues long enough and is now guaranteed and owed a prominent position on the political stage. He is simply going through the motions, checking a box: a glad-handing session here, a photo-op there. He’s sucking it up and straightening his jaw only because he has to. Soon enough he’ll never have to deal with all the dirty, nasty little people ever again and he can get on once again with his profitable associations with the One Percenters—the people who really matter in Mitt Romney’s vision of America.

The current hand-shaking Mitt Romney out there on the stump is a soulless automaton who is deeply disgusted by the masses, even though they are the ones who put butter on his bread and help ensure that the Romney household is never want for a sweet teaspoon of high-grade marmalade.

In the years since I saw that face recoiling from a young woman’s presentation so many years ago, a lot has happened. The Up-and-Comer enjoyed a brief taste of prominence before falling far off the political radar screen—a casualty, it seems, of an on-the-record record of actions, votes and comments that fell somewhat contrary to the manufactured persona that had been sold to the masses during his initial debut on the political stage.

My “kids” have all grown and have scattered far, far away. I run into one or two of them from time to time, usually around the holidays when they’re returning home to show off new children to eager grandparents. A few of the most unlikely have become brilliantly successful, I’m told, while some of the ones who had shown the brightest promise have faltered or detoured into the ordinary routines that most of us end up enduring. I suppose I remember my interactions with these former young jewels more than I would have remembered any of the interactions I might have had sitting at the Grown-Ups Table. All things considered, I cherish the brief relationships that I formed with some of those youngsters as being among some of the best moments of my life. Few things are more intoxicating or invigorating than Youth and Hope. And few things are more sobering than reality.

I no longer hold any delusions that an honest man with no ambitions other than trying to make the world a better place for those who are unable to do so themselves can make any difference in the political arena. Politics exists nowadays to feather the nests of the already feathered. I believe real change and real charity is still possible, but only through the actions of committed individuals.

When I choose to these days, I spend the bulk of my time trying to help out in things that can be helped. There are grass-roots causes and grass-roots actions that can make a big difference to people—whether it be a few dollars to support a cause, a shovel in hand to build a new trail, five minutes in support of a cause before the local yokels, or a smile handed out freely in a sea of sadness. These opportunities are usually well below the radar of any organized group, but they present themselves each and every day. I believe it is incumbent upon every individual to find causes that will contribute to the collective good and do something about them if so moved.

Washington and our local state houses have been taken over by robots compelled to divert every penny of public wealth into the hands of their programmers. The cold, dead eyes of Mitt Romney stand as testament to the wholesale robbery of the soul of this nation.

Our future relies on the individual. I hope a few of them are still alive out there.

Protest Song

Santa Claus brought us a wonderful historic collection of last-century protest songs. A huge collection!

The music must have gone right into my brain pan because my noggin’ concocted some kind of verse or refrain that has been popping up over and over. I guess that means I needed to write it down.

Folk music for modern times:

John Boehner’s got a boner—
a hard-on for the working class.
And each of us is really gettin’ screwed!

Mitch McConnell’s got a gobble
underneath his turkey neck
You should see how it looks in the nude!

Tar and feather the turkey!

Run the dick out of town on a rail!

Got to keep the ship afloat!

We shall overcome.

Occupy Reality

Just as everyone suspected, it would only be a matter of time before our Corporate Overlords would get really nervous about the Occupy Wall Street (and other areas) movement and put out the call to shut it down and shut it down permanently.

Calling out the inequalities of the “Ninety Nine Percent” versus the plutocratic slave masters of the One Percent can only serve to rile up the masses, and that’s just not good for Business (all hail!). As everyone knows, a riled mass is an unproductive and disorderly mass, not subject to control and manipulation. The illusory veneer of prosperity and fairness was beginning to crumble under the weight of the protesting masses. More importantly, the Occupy protestors were beginning to wake up much of America from its narcotic sleep of induced consumerism. Something had to be done.

So the Slave Masters put out the call to the hired hands—our bought-and-sold elected officials who reside at Federal, State and Local levels—and soon we had legions of bootlicking cops swarming in with pepper spray and Billy Clubs to bust a few heads and break up the movement. Their instructions were to set an example, to show the Occupiers that America’s Corporate Overlords reign supreme and are more powerful even than Constitutional Rights or any sense of moral and ethical decency that we had deluded ourselves into believing that we may have once possessed. Spill some blood, break some things and scatter these protestors like roaches, came the order. And the cops eagerly obeyed.

So now that our once-great nation has formally rescinded the First Amendment (may she always be remembered and rest in peace) with the full blessings of the Mindless Milling Masses who don’t bother to vote and who spend their days face-down in the artificial world of (anti)”Social Media,” the only thing left to do is to take direct action against those who enslave us and rob our planet of all that is good and decent.

Want to take action against Wall Street and corporate greed?  Here are a few direct actions you can undertake. They may seem small on an individual scale, but when done collectively by every member of the 99 Percent, they will help restore the American Dream.

There are better solutions than protesting or camping out on the streets. Let face it, the Occupy Wall Street movement started out good, but quickly got polluted by interlopers and agitators (likely paid plants sent in to change public opinion about the movement). While most Americans agreed with the original sentiments of the Occupy movement, many later got turned off by it as the actions of a few tarred the reputation of the many.

A better solution to protesting is acting directly against “The One Percent.” Here’s how:

• Are you contributing to a 401K or similar plan? Stop your contributions. Set aside that 15 percent a year for yourself. Your returns will be greater and you’ll stop fueling the incestuous money train of “fees and commissions.” As many have seen since the early 1990s, the myth of big returns through investments in Corporate Ponzi Schemes is just that: A Myth. If every American eliminated his or her contributions to 401K plans, it would be the death of a thousand pin pricks in the jugular of our Corporate Overlords.

• Support small, local businesses. You may pay slightly more, but those businesses directly support your community and neighbors. Big Box supports overseas jobs and overseas manufacturers. Don’t shop by price, shop by conscience. Shop local, buy local. The job you save may be your own.

• Purchase only what you need. Stop texting and look at the world around you. See what’s worth preserving and witness what your addiction to consumerism and plastic is doing to our habitat. Realize that once this place is gone, there is no other place to go. While the Über Rich may think their affluence can shield them from catastrophe, no amount of money can restore a species, a watershed or a body riddled with cancer. Is that extra pair of sneakers worth it? Do you really think you can amass enough wealth or Cheap Chinese Junk to stop the inevitable?

• Barter as much as possible. Can you fix your neighbor’s car for a month’s worth of eggs? Can you take a senior portrait of your neighbor’s kid in exchange for tailoring or landscape work? If so, make a trade and take advantage of ultra-local economies.

• Don’t use your credit card. Pay cash for everything you can. Stop the incestuous money train of “fees and commissions.” When you do use credit, pay off your monthly balance in total each month. Also, don’t use banks that charge fees for any service. Make it your personal annual goal not to pay a penny in interest or fees this year.

• Get to know your neighbors. They may be different than you, they may even be struggling, but they are human beings and the nearest members of your tribe. Get to know them, help them, let them help you, form close relationships. Band together and organize with your neighbors to keep thieves, criminals and crack houses out of your neighborhood. Don’t count on law enforcement to keep your neighborhood safe (because law enforcement can only be counted on to cater to “The One Percent”). Take the law into your own hands, but in a good way. Take care of your neighborhood. Take pride in it. Keep it clean. Have a block party.

• Support a veteran. They fought for our rights. They will continue to fight for them. As we saw in some of the Occupy dramas, it was the veterans out there who really understood what was at stake when the local yokels started making overtures toward rescinding the First Amendment.

• Demand that your local businesses pay their employees living wages. Patronize the stores of those who do, and gently remind those that don’t that you have a choice where to spend your money. (Also, use cash so local businesses don’t have to cut into their own bottom line with credit card fees. Local businesses lose 7 percent of their margin and the Wall Street Fat Cats grow fatter with each credit-card transaction.)

• And finally, remember that you are a compassionate human being, a creature of God, a manifestation of The Most High. Your personal behavior and actions should be a manifestation of His grace.

Occupy reality.

Judgement Day Hangover

I awoke this morning to bright rays of streaming sunshine, brilliant azure skies and sparkling green grass. It felt like I was in paradise. Maybe I was.

Last night was supposed to have been the beginning of the End of the World as we know it, according to some 89-year-old multimillionaire “preacher” who had forecast May 21 as the Biblical day of judgement here on Earth. People were flocking to the preacher’s compound in their RVs and broken down automobiles, as if ascending into heaven was a social experience that necessitated long drives to faraway places. If the Rapture really was going to occur, wouldn’t it be better to meet all your righteous friends up in Heaven?

While many across the country gave away their fortunes or made arrangements for sinners who were certain to be left behind to take care of their pets (a place with no dogs certainly couldn’t be heaven, could it?), there was no mention of whether the instigating preacher had given away his own millions since it wouldn’t be needed beyond the Pearly Gates. In heaven the streets are paved with gold and the nectar is always billed to a running tab. Money? Who needs it?

It’s not worth ridiculing some doddering old fool about having the audacity to prognosticate (incorrectly) the exact date of an event that the Bible itself says no man can ever foresee. What is worth ridiculing are all those souls—the preacher included—who were so utterly arrogant to believe that they would undoubtedly be among the chosen ones who would ascend to heaven. Wasn’t humility a virtue in the Bible?

Those who stood outside the preacher’s compound waiting in rapt anticipation for their own impending ascension are the very same people who are so quick to condemn others in the “name of the Lord” for things like domestic partnerships or different methods of showing faith in God. These are the very same people who are so convinced that they alone are so tapped into the Will of the Infinite, that they can—and should—dictate the laws and conduct of the land. I guess the fact that these sad, presumptuous souls silently drifted away back to their daily lives after it became clear last night that nothing was going to happen means that they don’t have the inside track on God’s Will after all.

Hopefully they’ve learned something.

I guess what’s saddest to me about all of this is that today there are a lot of people who woke up bitterly disappointed that Judgement Day didn’t actually occur. Some of these people have told reporters that they were hoping with their heart of hearts to take part in the Rapture because heaven (i.e. Death) is much more preferable to another day on Earth. Think about that for a moment, and think about how anti-Christian that sentiment really is.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth—a paradise for all mankind. He gave us dominion over this place, and charged us with its stewardship. The fact that people are willing to reject God’s greatest gift to us (life) for Death is an abomination. If the Lord really is angry about something, He’s angry about this. In rejecting this gift, we are rejecting Him. In condemning His creations (other humans), we are condemning Him. No man has the capacity and the ability judge—that is a responsibility that falls to God alone.

Maybe instead of scurrying to predict the next Hour of Judgement and the next opportunity for Death, the preacher and his followers and all others of his ilk ought to focus on forgiveness, goodwill and stewardship—on honoring God’s greatest gift to us. In that way, they may actually have a better chance at ascending when Judgement Day sneaks upon us like a thief in the night.

A meltdown of values

I can think of something worse than radiation: Lies. And in the ensuing weeks since disaster devastated Japan, killing thousands of people and displacing thousands more, a pernicious cloud of lies has been swirling the globe.

Ever since we learned that four nuclear power plants suffered grave damage in the wake of the historic earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan, the nuclear power industry worldwide has been scrambling to duck and cover—duck questions and cover up the truth, that is. This is precisely why nuclear power should never be allowed a foothold on our planet. The nuclear power industry has too much money and too few ethics to be granted such a privilege.

In the early days of the accident, news trickled out like particles of iodine-131. People naturally had questions. Were the people of Japan safe? Was anything leaking from the reactors? What about reactor number 3, with its core of plutonium and uranium? Had its core been breached? What were the radiation levels beyond the stricken reactor complex?

At first the questions were met with deafening silence. No one, foreign or domestic, dared weigh in with answers to these very sincere and very important questions. Hours turned to days, days turned to weeks. We heard stories about radiation in milk and spinach near the melting power plant. The tap water in Tokyo was tainted, unfit for consumption by babies. Then we heard the levels were low. Harmless. Like a kitten. The radiation that had left the plant was like a playful, cantankerous little kitten—all furry and fun-loving, not dangerous in any way. Stooges for the nuclear industry had the audacity to posit that these low levels of radiation were actually beneficial, good for you, as if the people down wind of the spewing reactors were actually being done a favor!

Meanwhile, in board rooms and policy rooms around the globe, big-time investors in nuclear power and their friends in high places were experiencing meltdowns in their bowels and colons. A new meltdown 25 years after Chernobyl—a span of time that should have been long enough to allow people to forget that Russian horror show—was causing as much of a run on Irritable Bowel Syndrome remedies amongst the Blue Bloods as it was on potassium iodide pills among the rest of us. And why not? The President of the United States had just recently pledged huge—we’re talking ginormous!—giveaways to the Usual Suspects to start pumping out nuclear power plants on the North American continent like McDonald’s pumps out hamburgers. It was a great opportunity: The government pays for the plants and takes all responsibility for wastes and cleanup and the companies reap the profit.

But now the public will be wary about licensing new nuclear plants, as it should be. Once again, the nuclear power industry has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it cannot—and more importantly, should not— be trusted. Curses! Foiled again!

During the past several weeks I have spent time perusing recorded memories of people involved in the Chernobyl accident and its aftermath. It has been a profoundly sad pastime. Sadder still has been the realization that the nuclear drama playing out in Japan has been eerily similar to the Russian misfortune of a quarter century ago. In the coming months and years we will learn that “miscalculations” and “honest errors” resulted in much higher radiation exposures to the people living near and not-so-near the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex. With the passage of time, radiation levels will become known in plain English, torn free from their confusing, confounding cloak of millisieverts, Becquerels, rads or rems—terms juggled and interchanged from one day to the next to obfuscate the true seriousness of the accident.

Like we did after Chernobyl, we will see innocent Japanese people giving birth to little monsters conceived during the flood of atomic incompetence that is playing out before our very incredulous eyes. Cancers will begin to blossom on the isle of Japan and the atomic apologists will weigh in with plausible deniability. The irradiated sea will spawn mutations. We will learn that the kitten had claws after all—claws like Godzilla.

We will hear official figures and death tolls, all lowballed to “acceptable levels,” and we will be instructed to focus on the positive. We will hear apologies and vows by the nuclear power industry that it will do better next time.

But there should never be a next time. If we have learned one thing about the nuclear power industry during the time that has passed since Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Fukushima Daiichi, it is this: Greed transcends culture. And truth will always be slain by greed and corporate interests.

We send our prayers to the people of Japan.

No cheese at the end of the tunnel

Feeling a certain urge to munch on lettuce and nest in little piles of shredded newspaper? Get used to it. The U.S. Supreme Court has officially ruled that we are nothing more than Guinea Pigs for the pharmaceutical industry.

In a 6-2 vote, the Court disallowed  a lawsuit alleging that a diphtheria-pertussis-tetnus vaccine, which has since been taken off the market, caused seizures in a little girl. The court ruled that the case should go through a tribunal created by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and not to a jury. Problem is, the tribunal already ruled against Hannah Bruesewitz, the girl with the seizures, so now she has no further recourse—but her parents still must provide for her care, according to news reports.

The case, Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, is a victory for pharmaceutical companies since it provides no incentive for them to make a safe vaccine. Just so you know, the Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which administers the “Vaccine Court,” draws its compensation pool from a tax on vaccines. With the High Court’s ruling, Big Pharma now bears essentially zero risk for a vaccine bungle. How comforting.

Conspiracy theories about vaccines abound among the foil-hat crowd. Some say humans are mere Guinea Pigs for pharmaceuticals companies, which have been enlisted by the Illuminati to prepare diabolical concoctions as part of a global eugenics program meant to ensure the survival of a cabal of Puppet Masters while selectively exterminating The Rest of Us.

I can’t vouch for the veracity of those claims, but I sure do know this: with the Supreme Court’s latest ruling, there’s no real disincentive now to prevent an evil doctor from adding some fun new surprises to a vaccine.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea! Wouldn’t it be great if a flu shot also provided natural male enhancement or added some inches to a lady’s rack?”

And away we go….

A few years from now, you’ll see me and a whole bunch of other Guinea Pigs lined up in front of the Vaccine Court arguing that our luxurious new man boobs were the result of the latest round of H1N1 vaccinations.

“Your honor, my eyes are up here!”

In the tribunal room next door, a group of women will be seeking compensation for the sudden unannounced appearance of misbehaving members that remain erect for more than four hours at a time. Meanwhile, our carefree friends at Big Pharma will be cooking up new experiments for delivery into an unsuspecting population that runs the exercise wheel without recourse.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m looking forward to settling into a newspaper. Literally.