Fukushima brings us a glowing report on Bluefin Tuna from Japan

The mass media inundates us daily with news about celebrities' lives and other such mind numbing nonsense.  It's hard to escape it. So many of us take the alcohol and drug route which is a better response to this pain than politics as far as the 1% is concerned. I don't think it's that people don't recognize this messed up situation  as it is that they simply don't see a way out of it.

One very positive aspect of the Internet is that the rest of us have access to much more information if we take time to look for it.  Not only that, the Internet and social networking sites make it more difficult for the 1% to control information, who sees what.  I mean, everyone has a video camera these days. I saw an al Jazeera documentary about rape in India and some women were able to organize around this issue through Facebook.  Sure, they can shut these things down but it's not as easy as that.  The Internet is used by them as well in facilitating capital accumulation.

It is not an accident that katrina or Fukushima have disappeared from the media radar screen as opposed to 911 for example.  Katrina was a domestic disaster brought about by the activity or lack of it of the US ruling class.  Fukishima also reflects a serious flaw in the system. September 11th was aslo a disaster brought about due to the crisis of capitalism but a useful one.  It allowed the US bourgeois to embark on its "Full Spectrum Dominance" strategy for a very brief moment.  It was a foreign enemy, a threat to our freedoms and way of life.  I think it was Goering or one of the Nazi leaders that stressed the need to create foreign threats to manipulate domestic thinking.

But Fukishima,is a disaster of capitalism, the free market at work and is certainly a disaster of historic proportions and, like the BP spill, the actual effects of it Will not be known for centuries and as long as the capitalist media can do so it will be kept out of the public eye.

It turns out that Bluefin Tuna are turning up off the shores of California with much higher levels of radioactive contamination.  These Tuna migrate south of Japan northward along the east coast past the Fukishima area.  According to a new study, the fish off California's coast have ten times higher radioactive cesium than previously measured, every fish measured had it.

These are developments that the ruling class are also concerned about but can do little to prevent as like most of the crises society face, originate not from individual behavior or character failings but from our social organization, from a system of production in which the means by which we produce  the necessities of life, in this case energy, is privately and not collectively owned.

The capitalist's mass media points out that their scientists expected such contamination but didn't expect it to "linger in huge fish that travel the world because they can shed radioactive substances". I might have been willing to take a scientists word for such proclamations before I understood that scientific study under capitalism has a class bias.  Scientist are not exempt from class bias though, and you can fool me once as they say.

Despite their concern on hearing such news the mouthpieces of global capitalism assure us that the radioactive contamination is "..well below the safe-to-eat limits set by the US and Japanese governments." 

Oh, that's reassuring.