RSN: Robert Reich | Bernie Is a Movement, and That Movement Cannot Be Stopped,

Reader Supported News | 11 March 16

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Robert Reich | Bernie Is a Movement, and That Movement Cannot Be Stopped 
 
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page 
"If there was any doubt before, there can be no longer: Bernie Sanders is a movement, and that movement will not and cannot be stopped." 
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James Risen | Half-Built Nuclear Fuel Plant in South Carolina Faces Test on Its Future 
James Risen, The New York Times 
Risen writes: "Time may finally be running out on the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, a multibillion-dollar, over-budget federal project that has been hard to kill." 
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The Department of Energy wants to abandon the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility near Aiken, South Carolina. (photo: High Flyer/SRS Watch) 

ime may finally be running out on the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, a multibillion-dollar, over-budget federal project that has been hard to kill.

The Energy Department has already spent about $4.5 billion on the half-built plant near Aiken, S.C., designed to make commercial reactor fuel out of plutonium from nuclear bombs. New estimates place the ultimate cost of the facility at between $9.4 billion and $21 billion, and the outlay for the overall program, including related costs, could go as high as $30 billion.

Officials warn that the delays in the so-called MOX program are so bad that the plant may not be ready to turn the first warhead into fuel until 2040.

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http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/35671-half-built-nuclear-fuel-plant-in-south-carolina-faces-test-on-its-future

Robert Parry | Recovering From a Cyber-Attack 
Robert Parry, Consortium News 
Parry writes: "The ugly reality is that such assaults are the modern equivalent of mobs smashing the presses of old-time newspapers that challenged the status quo. In such cases, the goal was to silence dissent by raising the price for telling the truth." 
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Digital security illustration. (photo: iStock)

ast week, we were told by IT experts that Consortiumnews was the apparent victim of a sophisticated “denial of service” attack that destroyed the site’s functionality by imposing so many commands on the system that it blocked us from updating content or restoring the site to a pre-attack status.

We have spent the past week – and thousands of dollars – recovering as much of our 20 years of content as possible and migrating to a new server where we had to essentially rebuild the site from scratch. It’s still not clear how much of our 20 years of work has been lost. We also will keep working to clear up a variety of glitches that remain.

It’s not clear who may have carried out this clever attack which apparently exploited a tiny flaw in our system, a spot where an older version of the Web site had been merged with a newer version. The encrypted malware was so subtle that it was missed by multiple virus scans and was only spotted by a tech examining the files manually.

But whoever was behind this attack, the ugly reality is that such assaults are the modern equivalent of mobs smashing the presses of old-time newspapers that challenged the status quo. In such cases, the goal was to silence dissent by raising the price for telling the truth.

Today, we find ourselves in what is sometimes called “information warfare,” an insidious concept in which powerful interests view critical facts as “enemy propaganda” that must be shut down. Though these interests already control much of the major media, they are remarkably sensitive to challenges from independent information sources.

By making information simply one battlefront in some ideological war, these forces justify attacks to silence sources of dissent that challenge the dominant official narratives. Cyber-attacking Web sites is just one tactic in that “war.” Shutting down contrary information, in turn, makes people easier to manipulate into actual wars and other costly adventures.

It is important that such intimidation not be successful.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35670-recovering-from-a-cyber-attack

Video: Black Protester Sucker-Punched at Trump Rally 
Justin Wm. Moyer and Jenny Starrs, The Washington Post 
Excerpt: "Multiple videos show a protester at a Donald Trump rally in North Carolina being sucker-punched by a Trump supporter." 
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We Should All Be Talking About Lady Gaga's "Till It Happens to You" 
Morgan McMurray, Law Street Media 
"'Till It Happens To You' has a title that is pretty much self-explanatory. It speaks from the point of view of a rape victim, questioning 'What the hell do you know?' to those who dismiss the issue of rape without fully understanding its magnitude. At the Academy Awards, Lady Gaga accompanied herself on piano, and towards the end of the ballad, welcomed dozens of sexual assault survivors - male and female - onto the stage with her." 
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8 Men Sentenced to 3 Years in Jail for Enslaving Fishermen 
Daniel Leonard, Associated Press 
Leonard writes: "Five Thai fishing boat captains and three Indonesians were sentenced Thursday to three years in jail for human trafficking in connection with slavery in the seafood industry." 
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World's Largest Private Coal Company Could Maybe, Finally Go Bust 
Katie Herzog, Grist 
Herzog writes: "Coal companies spend generations tearing up land, ruining communities, and pumping carbon into the atmosphere, and - in theory - it's up to them to make repairs afterward. But if they declare bankruptcy, however, someone else - namely, the American taxpayer - may be left to clean up their mess. If one environmental group has anything to do with it, however, any loans Big Coal gets will be used for fixing the problems they caused." 
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Bulldozer at work. (photo: Shutterstock)

hat happens when Big Coal goes bankrupt? Coal companies spend generations tearing up land, ruining communities, and pumping carbon into the atmosphere, and — in theory — it’s up to them to make repairs afterward. But if they declare bankruptcy, however, someone else — namely, the American taxpayer — may be left to clean up their mess. If one environmental group has anything to do with it, however, any loans Big Coal gets will be used for fixing the problems they caused.

The latest company to face a potential looming bankruptcy is Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal mine operator, Peabody shares plummeted 30 percent shortly after it released fourth-quarter results last year, and the company is now $6.3 billion in debt. Fellow coal monsters Alpha Natural Resources Inc. and Arch Coal Inc. have already filed for chapter 11, and if Peabody is unable to sells off its assets — including two coal mines in New Mexico and one in Colorado — it may soon do the same.

Peabody has a prospective buyer for its mine operations, but the buyer, Bowie Resources Partners LLC, missed the February deadline to secure financing for the purchase — and, if the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) has any sway, they won’t be able to find a bank to loan them the money at all.

RAN is putting pressure on Citigroup to refuse a loan to purchase Peabody assets*, as part of its long-term campaign to get banks to divest from coal and other fossil fuel operations. For years, RAN campaigned to get Bank of America and Citigroup to quit financing coal operators. Both banks ultimately did reduce their funding of coal companies and implemented new sustainability policies – though their intentions for doing may be financially motivated. “Over the past several years,” says BOA, “Bank of America has significantly reduced our exposure to coal extraction companies. … This commitment applies globally, to companies focused on coal extraction and to divisions of diversified mining companies that are focused on coal.”

If banks deny the loan, then Peabody will need to find another buyer, or it may be forced to declare bankruptcy. But while the bankruptcy of major industrial polluters may seem like a good thing, there is a problem: In theory, coal companies clean up the messes they make through land reclamation, but according to NPR, some states only require companies to pay for reclamation if the company is financially healthy, through a provision called “self-bonding.” “A self-bond isn’t much more than a wink and a promise,” Clark Williams-Derry, director of energy finance at Sightline Institute, told NPR. “A promise that … when the time comes, you’ll be good for it.”

But if companies like Peabody aren’t good for it, RAN offers another solution. As Ben Collins, senior campaigner at RAN told Grist in a phone interview, banks can influence where the money goes. Banks can make sure any financing goes towards land reclamation and worker pensions instead of, say, reviving the industry or paying lavish executive compensation. Arch Coal, for instance, doubled its CEO’s pay to $7 million even as the company was facing bankruptcy, cutting worker pay, and had stopped paying dividends.

“Banks have been profiting for years off companies that have had these negative impacts on communities, on workers, and on the environment,” said Collins. “They have an obligation to both address reclamation and make sure workers are protected.”

Whether financial institutions will fulfill that obligation? Well, that’s another story.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/35666-worlds-largest-private-coal-company-could-maybe-finally-go-bust