The no-BS info on Japan's disastrous nuclear operators

 for Truthout/Buzzflash

 by Greg Palast

Texas plants planned by Tokyo Electric. Image:NINA

I need to speak to you, not as a reporter, but in my former capacity as lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations.

I don't know the law in Japan, so I can't tell you if Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) can plead insanity to the homicides about to happen.

But what will Obama plead?  The Administration, just months ago, asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors to be built and operated on the Gulf Coast of Texas — by Tokyo Electric Power and local partners.  As if the Gulf hasn't suffered enough.

Here are the facts about Tokyo Electric and the industry you haven't heard on CNN:

The failure of emergency systems at Japan's nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field.

Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called "SQ" or "Seismic Qualification."  That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from Al Qaeda.

The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie.  The industry does it all the time. The government team I worked with caught them once, in 1988, at the Shoreham plant in New York.  Correcting the SQ problem at Shoreham would have cost a cool billion, so engineers were told to change the tests from 'failed' to 'passed.'

The company that put in the false safety report?  Stone & Webster, now the nuclear unit of Shaw Construction which will work with Tokyo Electric to build the Texas plant, Lord help us.

There's more.

Last night I heard CNN reporters repeat the official line that the tsunami disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactors, implying that water unexpectedly got into the diesel generators that run the pumps.

These safety back-up systems are the 'EDGs' in nuke-speak: Emergency Diesel Generators.  That they didn't work in an emergency is like a fire department telling us they couldn't save a building because "it was on fire."

What dim bulbs designed this system?  One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station 1 was built by Toshiba.  Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel system.

Now be afraid. Obama's $4 billion bail-out-in-the-making is called the South Texas Project.  It's been sold as a red-white-and-blue way to make power domestically with a reactor from Westinghouse, a great American brand.  However, the reactor will be made substantially in Japan by the company that bought the US brand name, Westinghouse — Toshiba.

I once had a Toshiba computer.  I only had to send it in once for warranty work.  However, it's kind of hard to mail back a reactor with the warranty slip inside the box if the fuel rods are melted and sinking halfway to the earth's core.

TEPCO and Toshiba don't know what my son learned in 8th grade science class: tsunamis follow Pacific Rim earthquakes. So these companies are real stupid, eh?  Maybe.  More likely is that the diesels and related systems wouldn't have worked on a fine, dry afternoon.

Back in the day, when we checked the emergency back-up diesels in America, a mind-blowing number flunked.  At the New York nuke, for example, the builders swore under oath that their three diesel engines were ready for an emergency. They'd been tested.  The tests were faked, the diesels run for just a short time at low speed.  When the diesels were put through a real test under emergency-like conditions, the crankshaft on the first one snapped in about an hour, then the second and third.  We nicknamed the diesels, "Snap, Crackle and Pop."

(Note:  Moments after I wrote that sentence, word came that two of three diesels failed at the Tokai Station as well.)

In the US, we supposedly fixed our diesels after much complaining by the industry. But in Japan, no one tells Tokyo Electric to do anything the Emperor of Electricity doesn't want to do.

I get lots of confidential notes from nuclear industry insiders.  One engineer, a big name in the field, is especially concerned that Obama waved the come-hither check to Toshiba and Tokyo Electric to lure them to America.  The US has a long history of whistleblowers willing to put themselves on the line to save the public. In our racketeering case in New York, the government only found out about the seismic test fraud because two courageous engineers, Gordon Dick and John Daly, gave our team the documentary evidence.

In Japan, it's simply not done.  The culture does not allow the salary-men, who work all their their lives for one company, to drop the dime.

Not that US law is a wondrous shield:  both engineers in the New York case were fired and blacklisted by the industry.  Nevertheless, the government (local, state, federal) brought civil racketeering charges against the builders. The jury didn't buy the corporation's excuses and, in the end, the plant was, thankfully, dismantled.

Am I on some kind of xenophobic anti-Nippon crusade?  No.  In fact, I'm far more frightened by the American operators in the South Texas nuclear project, especially Shaw. Stone & Webster, now the Shaw nuclear division, was also the firm that conspired to fake the EDG tests in New York. (The company's other exploits have been exposed by their former consultant, John Perkins, in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.)
If the planet wants to shiver, consider this:  Toshiba and Shaw have recently signed a deal to become world-wide partners in the construction of nuclear stations.

The other characters involved at the South Texas Plant that Obama is backing should also give you the willies.  But as I'm in the middle of investigating the American partners, I'll save that for another day.

So, if we turned to America's own nuclear contractors, would we be safe?  Well, two of the melting Japanese reactors, including the one whose building blew sky high, were built by General Electric of the Good Old US of A.

After Texas, you're next.  The Obama Administration is planning a total of $56 billion in loans for nuclear reactors all over America.

And now, the homicides:

CNN is only interested in body counts, how many workers burnt by radiation, swept away or lost in the explosion.  These plants are now releasing radioactive steam into the atmosphere. Be skeptical about the statements that the "levels are not dangerous."  These are the same people who said these meltdowns could never happen.  Over years, not days, there may be a thousand people, two thousand, ten thousand who will suffer from cancers induced by this radiation.

In my New York investigation, I had the unhappy job of totaling up post-meltdown "morbidity" rates for the county government.   It would be irresponsible for me to estimate the number of cancer deaths that will occur from these releases without further information; but it is just plain criminal for the Tokyo Electric shoguns to say that these releases are not dangerous.  Indeed, the fact that residents near the Japanese nuclear plants were not issued iodine pills to keep at the ready shows TEPCO doesn't care who lives and who dies whether in Japan or the USA. The carcinogenic isotopes that are released at Fukushima are already floating to Seattle with effects we simply cannot measure.

Heaven help us.  Because Obama won't.

***

Greg Palast is the co-author of Democracy and Regulation, the United Nations ILO guide for public service regulators, with Jerrold Oppenheim and Theo MacGregor. Palast has advised regulators in 26 states and in 12 nations on the regulation of the utility industry.

Palast, whose reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting.

Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts at GregPalast.com.
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 Dahr Jamail Last Modified: 08 Apr 2011

 http://english.aljazeera.net

 Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that was heavily damaged by the tsunami from the massive March 11 magnitude 9.0 earthquake continues to spread extremely high levels of radiation into the ocean, ground, and air.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company that operates the plant, said on April 5 that radioactive iodine-131 readings taken from seawater near the water intake of the No. 2 reactor reached 7.5 million times the legal limit. The sample that yielded this reading was taken just before Tepco began releasing more than 11,000 tonnes of radioactive water into the sea.

The radioactive water discharged into the Pacific has prompted experts to sound the alarm, as cesium, which has a much longer half-life than iodine, is expected to concentrate in the upper food chain.

"The situation is very concerning," Dr MV Ramana, a physicist specialising in issues of nuclear safety with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University told Al Jazeera, "They are finding it very difficult to stabilize the situation."

Operators of the plant are no closer to regaining control of damaged reactors, as fuel rods remain overheated and high levels of radiation are being released.

Until the plant's internal cooling system is reconnected, radiation will flow from the plant.

Nuclear safety agency spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama on April 3 offered the first sense of how long it might take to bring an end to the nuclear crisis.

"It would take a few months until we finally get things under control and have a better idea about the future," said Nishiyama, "We'll face a crucial turning point within the next few months, but that is not the end."

Ramana explained to Al Jazeera that he sees the current situation as being the "best case scenario," because "the wind has been largely over the ocean, there haven’t been any more major explosions, and none of the spent fuel areas have had a major fire."

Worst case scenario

"There could be a core that gets molten, and we could have an explosion," Ramana said of what he believes would be a worst-case scenario, "This isn't likely, but it is possible."

Mary Olson is the director of the Southeast Office of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), a group that describes itself as the information and networking center for citizens and environmental organisations concerned about nuclear power, radioactive waste, and radiation.

Olson shares Ramana's concerns about the worst-case scenario.

"The worst-case scenario is still out there, it could happen," Olson told Al Jazeera, "And that would be some kind of explosive force that mobilizes the fissile material on the site into a wider sphere."

Olson, who is also an evolutionary biologist with a double major in Biology and History of Science, including studies of chemistry and biochemistry at Purdue University, expressed concern over the fact that in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in the United States, "All the contaminated material generated from that was released to our environment in a planned and 'regulated' way. It was dumped in rivers or boiled off into the atmosphere."

Olson sees the same thing already happening now with the Fukushima disaster, and thinks the situation could eventually be worse than even the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that left some 200,000 people dead, according to a study from the environmental group Greenpeace.

"All of those [Fukushima] reactors have been in a catastrophic level of radioactive release that exceeds Chernobyl," she said,."Two of these have exploded, No. 2 is in meltdown, and we believe it has gone back into criticality and that there is a nuclear chain reaction coming and going."

She also pointed out that the fuel core in reactor No. 4 was offloaded for refueling at the time of the earthquake and tsunami, "So none of the fuel was in containment and was all in the pool and that's why it's gotten hotter faster and there has been very little attention to this. All of these are catastrophic in themselves. Having them in one place in one month is truly catastrophic."

Permanent interdiction

Dr Ramana warned that it would likely take several months without any more setbacks before the crisis can be declared stable.

"What we're seeing is a lot of the systems were taken out during the tsunami and explosions," he added, "The lack of power to circulate the water is a problem, so there aren’t going to be any quick fixes for these things."

Olson also fears that if the core meltdowns get to the groundwater under the plant, "You have an explosive force that is like putting dynamite under the site. The problem is if you get this molten fuel into that water it could cause a steam explosion."

"Since unit two is showing signs of fission happening, the chances of something more catastrophic happening at that site are increasing," Olson added, "People are acting like the worst is over, and that is just not understanding the real issues here as far as the radiological impacts."

She also pointed out that the fuel pool in reactor No. 3 "is gone, according to recent photos. There is no fuel there. The reactor fuel pool in No. 3 is gone. Where did it go?"

On Thursday, Japan's chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano said the current 20-kilometer evacuation zone around the plant may need to be enlarged due to the original parameters having been established in relation to short-term exposure.

"Current evacuation orders apply to areas where people are in danger of having received 50 millisieverts [of cumulative exposure]. We are now looking into what to do with other areas where, with prolonged exposure, people may receive that amount," Edano said.

A 50-millisievert amount is the exposure limit for a nuclear-plant worker for a full year.

"The regions the Japanese government has evacuated have been declared to be long-term, and these are regions of several hundred square kilometers and they are finding local hotspots that are further out,"  Ramana told Al Jazeera, "There is going to be an area around Fukushima that is going to be off-limits for human habitation for decades. The same thing happened with Chernobyl."

Olson agrees, and believes the mandatory evacuation area needs to be increased.

"Two hundred thousand people are now out of their homes," she said, "But the government needs to enlarge the evacuation area. Much of that area, to the north and west will become permanent interdiction, meaning nobody will be going home. There will be a fairly large area where nobody will be going home."

Taking 'safety' with a grain of salt

Recently disclosed documents show US regulators doubt that some of the nation's nuclear power plants can withstand a disaster akin to Fukushima's.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) members have questioned back-up plans to maintain cooling systems in case main power sources fail, and a July 2010 memo assessing Exelon Corporation's Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Delta, Pennsylvania, concludes that contingency plans, "have really not been reviewed to ensure that they will work to mitigate severe accidents".

A Union of Concerned Scientists statement by nuclear expert Edwin Lyman said, "While [regulators] and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about … it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure."

Possibly answering Olson's question about the missing fuel pool in Fukushima reactor No. 3, the document suggests that fragments of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown "up to one mile from the units" during one of the plants earlier hydrogen explosions.

This ejection of radioactive material could indicate far more extensive damage to the radioactive pools than has been previously disclosed.

Ramana, the Princeton University physicist, is clear in what he believes needs to happen within the nuclear industry to correct these myriad and potentially catastrophic problems.

"At the minimum you probably want to stop all nuclear construction until we get a much better understanding of what happened at Fukushima and what problems occurred," he said. "Even though the reactors shut down as they are designed to do, the problem was cooling water. In Chernobyl, it took years to really get a better understanding of what happened. Until that happens, all construction should be put on hold."

 Ramana points to another problem - that of building several reactors on the same site.

"There are six reactors on the same site at Fukushima, and what happened was that all of them were affected by one common cause, the tsunami. We also saw that when there were hydrogen explosions in one reactor, that affected the spent fuel at another reactor, so we have cross-effecting problems. Then when one started getting out of control, it impeded emergency steps that needed to be taken at other reactors. So building multiple reactors at one site is a bad idea, and should be stopped."

He said that previous accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have been dismissed by the nuclear industry. "Chernobyl was explained away due to Soviet operator errors and operators who had bad training, etc." he said, "So the argument for many years is that as long as we are using western built light water reactors we are perfectly safe."

"Now, however," he added, "Fukushima blows that idea out of the water. We are going to be told that new reactors are safer and that has to be taken with a grain of salt."

A nuclear Obama

The Obama administration has proposed $36bn in federal loan guarantees to jump-start the construction of nuclear power plants in the US

Nuclear operator Exelon Corporation has been among Barack Obama's biggest campaign donors, and is one of the largest employers in Illinois where Obama was Senator. The company has donated over $269,000 to his political campaigns.

Obama also appointed Exelon CEO John Rowe to his Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Energy Future.

Illinois, where Obama began his political career, gets approximately half of its electricity from nuclear power, more than any other state.

It currently has 10 operable reactors at six sites. The Quad-cities Nuclear Power Plant, located on the banks of the Mississippi River, is a GE Mark One plant, with the identical design and nearly the same age as the Fukushima reactors.

Olson said that even with Japanese and US government so-called acceptable limits of radiation exposure, "we’re still getting excess cancer".

She says it's too soon to say if the fallout from Fukushima will compare to cancers borne of the Chernobyl disaster, where two thirds of the excess cancers occurred outside of the Belorussia area.

"We are creating radioactive sacrifice zones on our planet," she said, "And these zones will persists for hundreds of thousands of years, and our genetics will be effected. Ionising radiation, especially when it is internalised in our bodies, randomizes DNA…so when cells are damaged, that is when cancer starts. And every single time radiation exposure occurs, there will be additional cancers."

Olson also pointed out that there is likely little Tepco can do to prevent the Fukushima plant's radiation from being released into the environment.

"All of that radioactive water they are holding will be diluted and released or evaporated into the air. The water is going off as radioactive steam or runoff, and all of that will end up in our environment because there is no place to put it. They treat it like dilution is the solution, but the more you spread it out the more human and animal tissue is exposed and the more cancer there is."

 Safety on the Cheap

 Robert Reich

  Mar 16, 2011 12:12PM

 Can we please agree that in the real world corporations exist for one purpose, and one purpose only — to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?

The New York Times reports that G.E. marketed the Mark 1 boiling water reactors, used in TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, as cheaper to build than other reactors because they used a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure.

Yet American safety officials have long thought the smaller design more vulnerable to explosion and rupture in emergencies than competing designs. (By the way, the same design is used in 23 American nuclear reactors at 16 plants.)

In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, then an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. A follow-up report from a study group convened by the Commission concluded that “Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely.”

Sound familiar?

The National Commission appointed to investigate the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last April recently concluded that BP failed to adequately supervise Halliburton Company’s work on installing the well.

This was the case even though BP knew Halliburton lacked experience testing cement to prevent blowouts and hadn’t performed adequately before on a similar job. In short: Neither company bothered to spend the money to ensure adequate testing of the cement.

Nor did Massey Energy spend the money needed to ensure its mines were safe.

And so on.

Don’t get me wrong. No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that’s one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It’s unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.

Inevitably there’s a tradeoff. Reasonable precaution means spending as much on safety as the probability of a particular disaster occurring, multiplied by its likely harm to human beings and the environment if it does occur.

Here’s the problem. Profit-making corporations have every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely harms.

This is why it’s necessary to have such things as government regulators, why regulators must be independent of the industries they regulate, and why regulators need enough resources to enforce the regulations.

It’s also why the public in every nation is endangered if the political clout of its biggest corporations — BP, Halliburton, Massey, G.E., or TEPCO — grows too large.

http://www.roubini.org

The dramatic events unfolding in Thailand – with 21 people killed by the army in the last few days – highlight the weakness of the present regime and the power of the mass movement. It is an indication of the impact of the present worldwide crisis of capitalism on this South East Asian country.

By Joe Gold , 13 April 2010

Photo by Nate Robert.

It is the beginning of Songkran, the equivalent to Christmas and New Year in the Buddhist calendar, when Thais celebrate by throwing water at each other. It is usual to ask permission first and the drenching is considered a blessing. Prime Minister Abhisit, who was born in the UK and educated at Oxford, seems not to grasp the subtleties of Thai culture. At his insistence the Army came with water cannons to break up demonstrations by his political opponents, then dropped tear gas grenades from a helicopter and fired rubber bullets leaving 21 dead so far and at least 800 injured.

The Red Shirts regrouped and fought back by releasing balloons at the helicopter and threw Molotov cocktails at the tanks. In the evening the Army and Police withdrew in what was described as an informal cease fire, leaving military vehicles in the hand of the Reds.

Last week the two sides were negotiating live on all Television channels but the impasse was obvious. The Red Shirt leaders demanded the dissolution of Parliament within 15 days and the government side argued that they could go a year early but would not resign until they had passed a budget and arranged the succession of the head of the armed forces. On Thursday Abhisit declared a state of emergency but police and military spokesmen announced that violence would not solve the problem. At one point Redshirts were hugging the police.

Abhisit was talking tough. He wanted a showdown and foreign opinion, especially the BBC, seemed puzzled and indignant as he had done nothing, refused to attack the demonstrators and allowed the crisis to drag on for a month. Surely in England, if a new Jarrow march had occupied Trafalgar Square, Oxford Street and Canary Wharf for the run up to Christmas they would be welcomed with Truncheons and Tasers, forced out with water cannons and tear gas, trampled by horses and filmed or photographed for identification and arrest at a later stage!

The government got arrest warrants for 17 hard line redshirt leaders, later increased to 27 and announced that if the leaders were arrested the crowd would drift away. They also managed temporarily to shut down the satellite channel and about 20 websites. So the police have not got near enough to arrest any of them.

Abhisit had warned that medium-to-severe force would be used. He had fallen out with the military top brass, accusing them of not doing their job of upholding the law and set a deadline of ending one of the main occupation sites before darkness fell on Saturday. Ambulances were standing by; the riot troops were equipped and ready. The sky train and buses stopped running and the heavily censored TV started to show pictures of a military advance into a retreating crowd of demonstrators obscured by clouds of teargas. As it turned out this may have been old footage of an attack on last year’s demonstrations. This time the redshirts had pushed back the troops, thrown tear gas canisters back at the police and even attacked a helicopter with balloons, fireworks and lanterns.

The troops opened fire with rubber bullets from above, but still facing defeat live ammunition was used, resulting in the deaths of most of the 14 redshirts who died and a Japanese photographer working for Reuter. Later claims by a government spokesman that troops had no live ammunition had already been contradicted by earlier government statements and threats, as had the claim that they had only wanted to clear a route for traffic and had no plan to end the demonstration.

Next came a military style attack on the army using M69 hand grenades, M79 grenade launchers and possibly AK47 rifles, although M16 rifles were also said to be used by some sources. This was aimed at the military command post from a nearby building and the target was first pointed out with laser technology. Among the army casualties were Romblao Thuwatam, deputy chief of staff of the 2^nd infantry division, and Major General Walit Rojanapakdi, commander of the same division. With the command post gone the troops pulled back abandoning their armed personnel carriers and Humvees, which were wrecked and vandalized by the redshirts.

This was no tactical withdrawal, as the government later claimed, but a military defeat. Major General Khattiya Sawasdiphol (aka Sah Daeng) was reported as admitting that an unnamed group of fighters came to assist the redshirt People’s Army and the commanders had been nullified. This should not have come as a total surprise as there had been a series of hand grenade attacks on banks and government departments for the last month since the demonstrations began. There had been speculation on who was responsible, either redshirts or opponents trying to discredit them, but they obviously had access to weapons, were a disciplined and competent group well able to avoid detection and showed a level of incompetence which could only have been intentional. Their hand grenades either failed to explode, missed their target, apart from one which injured two policemen who were out of sight playing pool. One grenade was found with the lever taped down and the pin removed. My conclusion is that these were warnings from a section of the military prepared to fight alongside the redshirts, probably the same small group of men in black who were seen carrying machine guns.

Photo by adaptorplug.As people’s TV went off the air this was the signal for demonstrators to head back to the centre of Bangkok and the crowd at the main intersection where numbers increased to something like 150,000. It was also the signal for provincial capitals in the north, especially Chiang Mai, to be taken over by the locals. There has been no comment here on the fact that although the main support comes from Isan and the North there are small groups in the crowd of Muslims from the South, their traditional head covering just visible under red scarves. Their numbers are growing even though Thaksin did nothing to address their demands for cultural freedom and the right to education in their own language. If they follow the lead of Chiang Mai they could get a degree of autonomy which the terror campaign will never achieve.

So what are the lessons from Thailand? Class struggles have gone on since the Bronze Age, and will not stop until the world is free of oppression. When the working class does not give a lead, the poor farmers and other oppressed layers can move forward in their own way. A TV station is now a primary target for both sides. Information and communication are critical. Just as mustard gas was found to be unusable in the First World War when the wind changed direction, Tear gas can be turned against the military forces. If Red Shirt leaders had copied the ultra-left approach of many groups we know, they would have chanted abuse at the troops in each confrontation, such as “Pigs Go Home”, “Troops out’’, but being ex-Maoists in some cases they had an – albeit indirect acquaintance with Marxism via the little red book and knew that when society is split there can also be divisions within the state machine and the army. They could shout at the troops “You are sons of the people; we will not fight you and you should not fight us.” When faced with the Thai royal police trying to start an attack from the HQ on Rama 1 they could put Buddhist monks on the front line. Even though the monks had to retreat when policewomen were moved to the front line and the monks were not allowed to be touched by women, this had the effect of moving the police back to a defensive position.

The unleashing of armed police on the protestors far from holding the movement back have enraged the masses even more. The killing of unarmed civilians has led the protestors to state that they will not negotiate with “murderers”. Jatuporn Prompan, one of the protest leaders, is reported to have stated that, “There is no more negotiation. Red shirts will never negotiate with murderers. Although the road is rough and full of obstacles, it’s our duty to honour the dead by bringing democracy to this country.”

The present government is therefore hanging by a thread. It is proving incapable of holding back the masses, so what useful purpose does it now have for the ruling class? That explains why no there are plots afoot to destabilize the Democratic Party and the Prime Minister. Abhisit’s party is under investigation for an alleged 258 million baht [£5.2 million] donation from TPI Polene, a Thai company. According to Thai law a party cannot receive more than ten million baht from any individual or company. If the allegations are confirmed Abhisit could be banned from office on corruption charges. This would be a convenient way of removing him as he is now so hated by the mass of ordinary workers, peasants and urban and rural poor.

The King in all this has remained silent, which is probably the best things he can do, as his position is already very precarious. However, it is clear the Ruling class will have to find some kind of compromise to appease the farmers. The military are already intervening via the head of the armed forces, General Anupong Paochinda. He conceded on Monday that it may be necessary to dissolve parliament to end the crisis.

first published: www.marxist.com

1. Achieving the goal of establishing a genuine democracy that has the King as our Head of State, with political power belonging exclusively to the people. We reject any attempt, past or future, at using the monarchy to silence dissent or advance a particular agenda.
   .2) Dissolving the 2007 Constitution and restoring the 1997 Constitution, which may then be amended through a transparent, consultative, and democratic process...3) Bringing Thais together in an effort to solve our political and socio-economic problems, recognising that such efforts must stem from the power of the people...4) Implementing the rule of law, due process and a system of equal justice for all, free of any obstructions or double-standards...5) Uniting all Thais who love democracy, equality, and equal justice within all facets of society, in an effort to deconstruct and move beyond the Amartyatippatai (Aristocracy) system...6) Using exclusively non-violent means to achieve these objectives.