New York Times Minimizes Impacts of Three Mile Island

BY KARL GROSSMAN

 JANUARY 10, 2024Facebook

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Image courtesy of Exelon.

The New York Times minimized the impacts of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in its obituary this week for Joseph Hendrie, the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of the accident. Hendrie was removed from the NRC chairmanship eight months after the accident because, as then President Jimmy Carter put it, under Hendrie’s helm the NRC was “unable to fulfill its responsibility for providing an acceptable level of safety for nuclear power plants.”

The Times reported that in its obituary for Hendrie.

There was a “pull quote” in the middle of The Times piece: “He was fired after the meltdown at the nuclear power plant.”

But a reader would not know exactly what the problem was by reading the obituary Monday, written by Trip Gabriel, a national correspondent of The Times.

Of the Three Mile Island accident, “Minimal radioactivity was released, and there were no immediate deaths,” Gabriel writes in its fourth paragraph. “But official miscommunication and lingering confusion over the severity of the threat inflamed a long-running national debate about nuclear safety. Movie theatres that year were showing ‘The China Syndrome,’ a hit thriller about a nuclear plant disaster. Nearly 200,000 protesters turned out in New York City six months after Three Mile Island for an antinuclear rally.”

Among researchers determining that there were substantial deaths as a result of Three Mile Island radiation releases have been Steven Wing and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina. “Study Links Three Mile Island Radiation Releases to Higher Cancer Rates,” was the 1997 article by Joby Warrick in the Washington Post.

It began: “Researchers have linked radiation releases from the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to higher cancer rates in nearby communities in a study that could reopen debate over the nation’s worst commercial nuclear accident. The report, released today, concludes that increases in lung cancer and leukemia near the Pennsylvania plant suggest a much greater release of radiation during the 1979 accident than had been believed. Previous studies concluded that radiation exposure to humans was minimal. A 1990 Columbia University analysis using the same data as the new study found no clear connection between the accident and cancer rates among residents living near the plant.”

It quoted Wing, an associate professor of epidemiology, saying: “The cancer findings, along with studies of animals, plants and chromosomal damage in Three Mile Island area residents, all point to much higher radiation levels than were previously reported.”

The research was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Science.

Science magazine in a 1997 article reported that “After reexamining the region’s cancer statistics and measured radiation levels, epidemiologist Steven Wing and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, concluded that more radiation may have escaped than was measured and that the risk of some cancers did rise. Wing found that people presumed to have been exposed to the highest doses of radiation were almost twice as likely to develop lung cancer as were those who received the lowest doses. His team also found that the risk of adult leukemia was almost seven times higher for those in the highest exposure group.

The book “Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation” devotes many pages to the Three Mile Island accident including in a chapter titled “People Died at Three Mile Island.” Published in 1982, it was authored by Harvey Wasserman, a journalist who has specialized in nuclear power; Norman Solomon, an investigative reporter and media critic; and Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Walters, director of and associate director of the Environmental Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Alvarez also was senior policy adviser to the U.S. Energy Department secretary and a senior investigator for the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.

The book presents research done on cancer and the Three Mile Island accident including that of Dr. Ernest Sternglass, long professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. It quotes Sternglass in 1981 stating: “The Three Mile Island accident will turn out to have produced the largest death toll ever resulting from an industrial accident, with total deaths from all causes likely to reach many thousands over the next 10 to 20 years.”

I wrote and presented a TV documentary in 1993, “Three Mile Island Revisited,” beginning with, standing with the Three Mile Island plant in the background, saying: “The nuclear industry says that nobody died because of the accident back there at Three Mile Island but don’t tell that to the people here in Goldsboro or others living in what’s become a valley of death surrounding Three Mile Island.”

I conducted interviews about how cancer had become widespread in and around Goldsboro and how quietly the owner of Three Mile Island had given cash settlements, some as high a $1 million, to members of families of those who died or were left with health impacts as a result of the accident.

A superb new documentary on Three Mile Island is “Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island” which was released last year and is being widely shown throughout the world. Directed, written and produced by Heidi Hutner, a professor of environmental humanities at Stony Brook University, it has received many awards.

In it, resident after resident of the area around Three Mile Island is interviewed and tells of widespread cancer that has ensued in the years that have followed the accident—a cancer rate far beyond what would be normal. Accounts shared in the documentary are heartbreaking.

In “Radioactive,” a whistleblower who had worked at the nuclear plant tells Hutner of the deliberate and comprehensive attempt by General Public Utilities, which owned TMI, to cover up the gravity of the accident and its radioactive releases, especially of cancer-causing Iodine-131 and Xenon 133.

An attorney, Lynne Bernabei, involved in litigation in the wake of the accident, says the Three Mile Island “cover-up was one of the biggest cover-ups in history.”

The Times obituary for Hendrie, a physicist, points out that he was a booster of nuclear power. It relates: “Dr. Hendrie, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to lead the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency in charge of nuclear power safety, came in as a proponent of nuclear energy, criticized by environmentalists as too supportive of the industry.” It quotes Hendrie as saying when he was appointed: “My biggest challenge will be to keep nuclear power as a viable energy option.” Gabriel writes that Hendrie “pledged to end ‘the tortuous and Kafkaesque hearings’ on proposed nuclear plants.”

And even though Hendrie was bounced from the NRC chairmanship in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, he “remained one of the five members of the regulatory commission through the end of his four-year term in June 1981,” it adds. And, “in March of that year, President Ronald Reagan reappointed him chairman in an acting capacity.”

Then Hendrie, the obituary continues, “returned to the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where he had worked for two decades before joining the regulatory commission. In the 1960s, he had helped design and build a type of research reactor, the High Flux Beam Reactor, which provided very intense beams of neutrons.”

There was no mention in The Times obituary about what happened to the High Flux Beam Reactor. It was shut down in 1997 after it was found to be leaking radioactive tritium into the groundwater under Brookhaven National Laboratory—groundwater that flows into the community just south of the laboratory, Shirley. “Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town” was published in 2008, written by Kelly McMasters, a professor at Hofstra University who grew up in Shirley. In the book, she writes of the widespread cancer among people in Shirley which she links to the “nearby leaking nuclear laboratory.” Hendrie’s Brookhaven National Laboratory is a Superfund high-pollution site.

The obituary ends with a paragraph in which Gabriel writes: “Most recently, new interest has arisen in nuclear power as the largest source of non-carbon emitting energy at a time of heightened awareness of the climate crisis.” Not mentioned is how the nuclear fuel cycle—including mining, milling and enrichment—is carbon-intensive, and nuclear power plants, as did that High Flux Beam Reactor, emit carbon, radioactive Carbon-14.

I started writing my first book on nuclear power the day of the news of the Three Mile Island meltdown happening. In the book, first published in 1980, “Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power,” in a chapter with a focus on the press and nuclear power, I quote Alden Whitman, a reporter at The New York Times for 25 years, telling me that “there certainly was never any effort made to do” in-depth or investigative reporting on nuclear power. Why this attitude? “The Times does regard itself as part of the establishment…They get nervous when they attack industry. Certainly when they attack industry that is heavily involved in finance and the banks as nuclear power is, they would get very up tight.” Even in the wake of Three Mile Island, said Whitman, The Times’ stories on nuclear power have been “tucked away, put in the middle of the paper.”

This tradition continues at The New York Times.

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, and the Beyond Nuclear handbook, The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

Our Political Conundrum: Two Questions That Answer Each Other

BY THOMAS KNAPP

A LEFT LIBERTARIAN

 

JANUARY 11, 2024
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Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

It’s customary for op-ed columns to hang themselves on “news hooks” — the things you’re already reading about that just happened, are happening, or may be about to happen. The closest thing I to a “news hook” I could up with for this piece is that my friend Lloyd Sloan supports the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  So now, if you cared, you know.

You’ve probably heard of RFK Jr. You may not have heard of Lloyd Sloan, who calls himself an “Upper-Left Whig,” and who I call an eccentric libertarian (but I repeat myself), but I really think you SHOULD hear about — and think hard about — his two-question political quiz.

Question #1: Is government too big?

Question #2: Is wealth too unequal?

There are four possible combinations of answers to the two questions, which can be plotted on an up-down, left-right grid, and the positions of the two major parties cover three of the four.

Republicans tend to think government is too big but wealth isn’t too unequal (that’s the “upper right” position).

Democrats tend to think wealth is too unequal but government isn’t too big (the “lower left” position).

But some of each “major party” persuasion answer no to both questions (the “lower right”) position.

Most “third” parties likewise fall into one of those three quadrants.

The “upper left” position — which Sloan dubs the “whig” position — is that yes, government is too big, and yes, wealth is too unequal.

I happen to agree.  Whether RFK Jr. agrees is an interesting question, as is what to do about it, but in this column I’d like to propose that the questions answer each other, and that the affirmative answers to both questions explain the big problem in American politics.

Why is government too big? Because wealth is too unequal. Wealth is power, and the powerful get the government they want at the expense of the rest of us.

Why is wealth too unequal? Because government is too big. It wields sufficient power to redistribute wealth and, contrary to what you may have been led to believe,  it generally does so in an upward rather than downward direction.

While Marxists are wrong about many things, one of their old saws cuts right to the heart of the matter: The state is the executive committee of the ruling class.

That ruling class is defined by its wealth, and the whole point of its rule is to preserve and increase that wealth both through, and as, political power.

What can we do about that, short of abandoning political government altogether (my preferred solution)? I don’t know.

Sloan proposes three starting policy initiatives: Taxing only the rich, freezing government spending, and leaving NATO.

While I’m opposed to taxation, government spending, and foreign military adventurism on principle,, I have to admit that any or all of those proposals would be a start.

We won’t get any of those three from Donald Trump or Joe Biden. So if you envision positive change through voting, consider looking elsewhere.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

What Is to Be Done?

BY RICHARD D. WOLFF

 JANUARY 11, 2024
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Photograph Source: Ramsch – CC BY-SA 4.0

In 1863, the Russian social critic, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, published a novel entitled “What Is to Be Done?” Its story revolves around a central heroine, Vera Pavlovna, and her four dreams. It brilliantly intertwines her personal life and the social turmoil of Russia’s transition at the time from feudalism to capitalism. Chernyshevsky, a revolutionary imprisoned by the Czarist government, wrote a novel that was nothing less than a pioneering work of socialist feminism. In it, he also passionately appealed for an urban, industrial economy based on worker cooperatives, a modern and transformed version of Russia’s earlier agrarian communes. An appreciative Lenin entitled one of his most important political pamphlets, published in 1902, “What Is to Be Done?”

Two decades later, after the Soviet revolution defeated foreign invaders and domestic enemies in a long civil war, Lenin returned to the theme of worker cooperatives. In Soviet circumstances, much changed from Chernyshevsky’s Russia, Lenin argued forcefully for the USSR’s activists to recognize the enormous importance of building, spreading, and respecting cooperatives as key to Soviet socialism’s future. Worker coops, he argued, answered the burning political question among activists then: what is to be done? Here I want to adapt and apply Lenin’s argument to today’s social conditions that are raising that same question even more urgently.

Today’s capitalism is global—the basic economic structure of the world economy features its core employer-employee model. The “relations of production” inside enterprises (factories, offices, and stores) position a small minority of workplace participants as employers. They make all the basic “business decisions” about what, how, and where to produce and what to do with the product (and revenue when they sell it). They alone make all those decisions. Employees, the majority of workplace participants, are excluded from those decisions.

Capitalism today is also globally divided into two major blocs: one old and one new. The old is allied with the United States. Besides being older, the G7 is now the smaller of the two blocs, having shrunk in relative global importance over recent decades. It includes the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan as well as the United States. The now fast-rising newer bloc, the BRICS, first included Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Recently, it invited six new member states to join, as of January 2024: Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Argentina. Since 2020, the BRICS’ total GDP exceeded that of the G7, and that gap between them keeps growing.

The G7’s “mature capitalisms” all survived and grew because workers accepted the employer-employee organization of workplaces. Amid and despite the G7 nations’ endless ideological celebrations of democracy, workers accepted the total absence of democracy inside capitalist enterprises. With some exceptions and resistance, it became routine common sense that representative democracy somehow belonged in residential communities but not in the communities at work. Inside capitalist enterprises, autocracy was the norm. Employers ruled employees but were not democratically accountable to them. Employers in each capitalist enterprise enriched a select circle by delivering portions of the revenue to themselves, to owners of the enterprise, and to a few top executives. That select circle wielded extraordinary political and cultural influence. It replicated the absence of democracy inside its enterprises by keeping the democracy outside them merely formal. Governments in capitalism were typically shaped by that select circle’s paid lobbyists, campaign donations, and paid mass-media productions. In modern capitalism, the kings and queens banished in earlier centuries reappeared, altered, and relocated, as CEOs inside ever larger capitalist enterprises dominating whole societies.

Employees’ actual or anticipated opposition to democracy’s exclusion inside workplaces has always haunted capitalism. One major way employers can deflect such opposition is by narrowly defining their obligation to employees in terms of wages paid to enable consumption. Wages adequate for consumption became the necessary and explicitly sufficient compensatory reward for work. Implicitly, they likewise became the employees’ compensation for the absence of democracy within the workplace. Rising levels of employee consumption signaled a “successful” capitalism. In stark contrast, rising democracy inside the workplace never became a comparable standard for evaluating the system.

Making consumption the point and purpose of work contributed to a social overvaluation of consumption per se. Advertising contributed to that overvaluation too. Modern capitalist society added “consumerism” to its catalog of moral failings. Clerics thus routinely caution us not to lose sight of spiritual values in rushing to consume (of course, those spiritual values rarely include democratic rights inside workplaces).

Confronted and outcompeted by China and the BRICS, G7’s declining empires and economies now risk that mass consumption will increasingly be constrained. In declining empires, the rich and powerful preserve their wealth and privileges while offloading the costs of decline onto the mass of employees. Automating jobs, exporting them to lower-wage regions, importing cheap immigrant labor, and mass campaigns against taxes are the tried-and-true mechanisms to accomplish that offloading.

Such “austerities” are now in full swing nearly everywhere. They explain a good part of the mass working-class anger and bitterness in the older (G7-type) capitalisms expressed in gestures against social “elites.” Given capitalism’s long favoritism shown to its right-wing versus its left-wing critics, it should surprise no one that the anger and bitterness first take right-wing forms (Trump, Boris Johnson, Wilders, Alternative for Germany, and Meloni).

The political temptation for the left will be to focus again as it did in the past on demanding rising consumption now that a declining capitalism undermines it. Capitalism promised a rising consumption that it now fails to deliver. Fair enough, but that is not enough. Often in the past, capitalism was able to deliver rising real wages and workers’ living standards. And it may yet again. Indeed, China is now delivering just that.

The clear lesson is that the left needs a new and different answer to the question of what is to be done. Its criticism must effectively criticize and oppose capitalism when and where it is delivering rising wages and likewise when and where it is not.

Now is the time to expose and attack capitalism’s deprivation of democracy in the workplace and the resulting social ills (inequalities, instabilities, and merely formal political democracy). Workers’ goals never needed to be and should never have been limited to raising wages, important as that was and is. Those goals can and should include a demand for full democracy inside the workplace. Otherwise, whatever reforms and gains workers’ struggles achieve can subsequently be undone (as happened to the New Deal in the United States and social democracy in many other countries). Workers have had to learn that only democratized workplaces can secure the reforms workers win. What is to be done in the old, declining centers of capitalism is for class struggles to include the democratization of enterprises. A transition toward economies grounded on worker-cooperative enterprises is the strategic target.

In the new, ascending capitalisms in the world, the BRICS, a different logic leads again toward worker cooperatives as a focal goal for socialist politics and organizing. Among the BRICS, the same employer-employee model organizes factories, offices, and stores. Unlike the G7, the employers are relatively more often not private. Rather, some employers run privately owned enterprises, while others are state officials who operate enterprises owned by the state. In the People’s Republic of China, where roughly half of enterprises are private and half public, nearly all have adopted the employer-employee organizational model.

Where the state takes a large, major, or commanding role in economic development and especially where one or another socialist ideology accompanies and justifies that role, a turn toward a focus on worker cooperatives is now timely. It will attract many in those countries as socialism’s necessary next step. The “development” or socialism accomplished there—macro-level changes already achieved (via decolonization struggles and revolutions)—are celebrated but also widely understood as insufficient. Bigger social goals and changes motivated those struggles and revolutions. Democratizing enterprises takes “development” to a whole new level reaching toward those goals.

There is yet another source of the answer that now responds to the question: what is to be done? The qualities of democracy that have been achieved within the G7, the BRICS, or most other countries, to date have been more formal than substantive. Where elections of representatives occur, the influences of wealth and income inequalities, the social power wielded by CEOs, and their controls over mass media render democracy more symbolic than real. Many people know it; still more feel it. Extending democracy into the economy and specifically into the internal organization of enterprises represents a major step in moving political democracy beyond merely formal and symbolic to substantive and real. And much the same applies to moving socialism beyond its earlier forms.

The old cry to workers of the world to unify—“You have nothing to lose but your chains”—was an early, partial answer to the question: What is to be done? After a century and a half of development and socialisms, we can now provide a much fuller and more specific answer to that question. To get beyond capitalism’s core—the production relations of employer versus employee—we need explicitly to replace those relations with a democratized workplace, to substitute workers’ self-directed cooperatives for hierarchical capitalist business.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.Richard Wo

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

 

Charter Schools Will Desert And Violate Thousands In 2024

by Shawgi Tell / January 9th, 2024

Privately-operated charter schools have been around for 32 years. They fail and close every week, abandoning and harming hundreds of parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals. Neoliberals cynically call this “free market accountability.”

These closures, moreover, are often sudden and abrupt, revealing deep problems and instability in the charter school sector. Parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals often report being blindsided by such closures and how they have to anxiously scramble to find new schools for students.

Officially, 2,315 charter schools failed and closed between 2010-11 and 2021-22 alone (an 11-year period). On average, that is 210 privately-operated charter school failures and closures per year, or four charter school failures and closures per week. The real number is likely higher. Over the course of 30+ years more than 4,000 privately-operated charter schools have failed and closed. That is a high number given the fact that there are under 8,000 privately-operated charter schools in the country today.

The top four reasons privately-operated charter schools fail and close every week include low enrollment, poor academic performance, financial malfeasance, and mismanagement. Thus, for example, every week the mainstream media is filled with articles on fraud, corruption, nepotism, and embezzlement in the charter school sector. Not surprisingly, arrests and indictments of charter school employees, trustees, and owners are common.

While fraud, corruption, nepotism, embezzlement, and scandal pervade many institutions, sectors, and spheres in America, such problems are more common and intense in the charter school sector.

Despite all this, a dishonest neoliberal narrative keeps insisting that these privately-operated schools are superior to the public schools that have been defunded and demonized by neoliberals for more than 40 years. The public is constantly under top-down pressure to ignore or trivialize persistent charter school failures and problems.

In this context, the public should reject relentless neoliberal disinformation that public schools are a commodity or some sort of “free market” phenomenon. It should discard the idea that parents and students are consumers who should fend-for-themselves while “shopping” for a school. The law of the jungle has no place in a modern society. Such a ruthless survival-of-the-fittest approach to individuals, education, and society is outmoded, guarantees winners and losers, perpetuates inequality, and increases stress for everyone.

The public should defend the principle that education in a modern society is a social human responsibility and a basic human right, not a commodity or consumer good that people have to compete for. A companion principle is that public funds belong only to public schools governed by a public authority worthy of the name.

Charter schools are not public schools. They are privatized education arrangements, which means that they should not have access to any public funds that belong to public schools. Public funds should not be funneled to private interests. School privatization violates the right to education.

Currently, about 3.7 million students are enrolled in roughly 7,800 privately-operated charter schools across the country. The U.S. public education system, on the other hand, has been around for more than 150 years and educates about 45 million students in nearly 100,000 schools.

Shawgi Tell is author of the book Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.. Read other articles by Shawgi.