MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

“‘I have said it’s worse than Chernobyl and I’ll stand by that. There was an enormous amount of radiation given out in the first two to three weeks of the event. And add the wind blowing in-land. It could very well have brought the nation of Japan to its knees. I mean, there is so much contamination that luckily wound up in the Pacific Ocean as compared to across the nation of Japan – it could have cut Japan in half. But now the winds have turned, so they are heading to the south toward Tokyo and now my concern and my advice to friends that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed.’

So cautions Arnie Gundersen, widely-regarded to be the best nuclear analyst covering Japan’s Fukushima disaster. The situation on the ground at the crippled reactors remains precarious and at a minimum it will be years before it can be hoped to be truly contained. In the near term, the reactors remain particularly vulnerable to sizable aftershocks, which still have decent probability of occuring. On top of this is a growing threat of ‘hot particle’ contamination risk to more populated areas as weather patterns shift with the typhoon season and groundwater seepage.”  Read more.  Download interview here.

High levels of radiation found at Japan nuclear plant – “Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it sent a robot into the building of reactor 1 Friday and detected up to 4,000 millisieverts per hour at the south-east corner of the building. That means staying in that area for four minutes makes a worker exposed to the maximum annual limit of 250 millisieverts per year though no worker plans to work there, the operator said.” Read more.

By Paul Joseph Watson – “Yesterday’s so-called ‘horror’ show for the US economy with the release of new data illustrating how the economic ‘recovery’ has all but ground to a halt was met with feigned astonishment and shock by the establishment media, and yet for the past two years the public has been continually deceived about the true state of the financial system.

All the hot air about an ‘economic recovery’ has served to hide the fact that the United States is slipping back into a double-dip recession, if not a second ‘great depression,’ as market strategist Peter Yastrow told CNBC yesterday.

1) In 2009, when the media claimed the economic ‘recovery’ had begun, oil prices averaged $54 dollars a barrel. In the 24 months since, the cost has doubled. Americans are paying more and more to fill up at the pump with Goldman Sachs predicting that gas will hit $5 dollars a gallon by summer. This figure was already reached in Washington DC two months ago. Far from representing a ‘recovery’ this is in fact another crippling expense that many Americans people simply cannot afford.

2) The housing market has shown no ‘recovery’ whatsoever. The collapse in US house prices ‘is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.’ Prices have plunged by 33 per cent since 2007. Home ownership is at its lowest level for 20 years.” Read more.

Moody’s Warns of Downgrade for U.S. Credit – “Finally, a logical warning on US credit. Moody’s is out with a comment saying that if there’s no imminent progress on the debt ceiling fight, the US credit rating will be cut.” Read more.

Employment growth slows sharply in May – “The U.S. economy may be in for a prolonged period of soft growth as employers hired the fewest number of workers in eight months in May and the unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent. Nonfarm payrolls increased 54,000 last month, the Labor Department said, fewer than the most pessimistic forecast in the Reuters survey and just over a third of what economists had expected.” Read more.

By: Margo D. Beller – “Wall Street is having a hard time figuring out what to do now that the U.S. economy appears to be sputtering and yields are so low, Peter Yastrow, market strategist for Yastrow Origer, told CNBC.

‘What we’ve got right now is almost near panic going on with money managers and people who are responsible for money,’ he said. ‘They can not find a yield and you just don’t want to be putting your money into commodities or things that are punts that might work out or they might not depending on what happens with the economy.

‘We need to find real yield and real returns on these assets. You see bad data, you see Treasurys rally, you see all bonds and all fixed-income rally and then the people who are betting against the U.S. economy start getting bearish on stocks. That’s a huge mistake.’

Stocks extended losses after the manufacturing fell below expectations in May and the private sector added only 38,000 jobs during the month.

‘Interest rates are amazingly low and that, thanks to Ben Bernanke, is driving everything,’ Yastrow said. ‘We’re on the verge of a great, great depression. The [Federal Reserve] knows it.'” Read more.

Horror for US Economy as Data Falls off Cliff – “The last month has been a horror show for the U.S. economy, with economic data falling off a cliff, according to Mike Riddell, a fund manager at M&G Investments in London. ‘It seems that almost every bit of data about the health of the US economy has disappointed expectations recently,’ said Riddell, in a note sent to CNBC on Wednesday.” Read more.

By David G. Savage – “WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ordered California on Monday to release tens of thousands of its prisoners to relieve overcrowding, saying that ‘needless suffering and death’ had resulted from putting too many inmates into facilities that cannot hold them in decent conditions.

It is one of the largest prison release orders in the nation’s history, and it sharply split the high court.

Justices upheld an order from a three-judge panel in California that called for releasing 38,000 to 46,000 prisoners. Since then, the state has transferred about 9,000 state inmates to county jails. As a result, the total prison population is now about 32,000 more than the capacity limit set by the panel.” Read more.