Sunday, July 10, 2011

Fukushima Worst Industrial Catastrophe AND It is ONGOING

http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia/confirma-fukushima-peor-catastrofe-civilizacion-industrial


this link must be translated. I open google, select translate, and then post the link above into the box.


Here is the link I got after translating it.


Read the article above with Ulrich Beck's recent interview on Fukushima

Here is my summary of Beck's interview, with excerpted comments. Beck's verbatim comments are in blue text.The rest is my summary.
Ulrich Beck, a sociologist of risk, was interviewed about the Fukushima catastrophe in July of 2011. Ulrich described the Fukushima nuclear event as a “catastrophe” that “is unlimited in space, time and the social dimension. It's the new kind of risk” (Beck, 2011). When asked how such risks are produced, Beck responded: “Risks depend on decision making. The risk depends on the process of modernization. And they're produced with technological innovations and investment.” Beck denied that the disaster could have resulted simply from unforeseeable natural catastrophes:
"the decision to build an atomic industry in the area of an earthquake is a political decision; it's not done by nature. It's a political decision, which has to be justified in the public and which has been taken by parliament, by businesses and so on…. I think industries try to define it as something which has been done by nature. But they don't realize that we are living in an age where the decision making is the primary background for these kinds of catastrophes. I think it's very important to realize this because modernity, or even what you could say is the victory of modernity, produces more and more uncontrollable consequences."
Beck observes that with Fukushima and other modern risks stemming from human decision making “we have a system of organized irresponsibility: Nobody really is responsible for those consequences. We have a system of organized irresponsibility, and this system has to be changed.

Beck observes that the denial of responsibility—the system of organized irresponsibility—requires the populace and the state to assume costs of disasters. In this important sense, Beck points out, “this is a contradiction to capitalism and the market economy. We have the same discussion actually in relation to the banking system; it's quite similar. Actually, the banks should take care of possible crises, and maybe they should have an insurance principle as well. But they don't, so actually the state has to take it. This is socialism; this is state socialism.

The type of system Beck is describing as capitalist is not the system of capitalism fetishized by Adam Smith and described by Foucault in his account of the two liberal subjects, homo economicus and the the political subject of rights.


The current market system that has developed eschews the competition and entrepreneurialism so valorized by economists like Joseph Schumpeter. Rather, the capitalist system described here is defined by large entities that so dominate political decision making and processes, that they are able to extract value from the rest of the populace in ways that are not simply exploitative, but life threatening....

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