Higher Education Gone Wrong: Universities Are Turning into Corporate Drone Factories

Theodore Adorno

In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.
We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.Higher Education Gone Wrong: Universities Are Turning into Corporate Drone Factories
Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called "Education After Auschwitz." He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged." He wrote that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.
All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again," he wrote. "This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.
Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms" we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.

I had lunch a few days ago in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of English and cultural studies at University in Canada and who for many years was the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State. Giroux, who has been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American education, was driven to the margins of academia because he kept asking the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by university professors. He left the United States in 2004 for Canada.
"The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip on higher education that may have exceeded even what he had anticipated and most feared," Giroux, who wrote "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex," told me. "Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on the classes of progressive professors, the corporate grip on the university was tightening as made clear not only in the emergence of business models of governance, but also in the money being pumped into research and programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at Penn State, where I was located at the time, the university had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military power. Put differently, corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects and increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of developing weapons of destruction, surveillance and death. Couple this assault with the fact that faculty were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force. Many disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere."

Frank Donoghue, the author of "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities," details how liberal arts education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite or an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates into the arms of corporate entities they do not examine morally or ethically. They accept the assumptions of corporate culture because they have never been taught to think.
Only 8 percent of college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor's degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.

The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now "actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view -- all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations -- all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts."
This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and a press that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, one championed by ruthless capitalists (think of the brutal backstabbing and deception cheered by TV shows like "Survivor") and Hollywood action heroes like the governor of California. "This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong," Adorno wrote. "The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism."
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
"The political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against humanity -- whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts -- are always mediated by educational forces," Giroux said. "Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place."
The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.
Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and "leftist" professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. "He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person," Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG's Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.
"It is especially difficult to fight against it," warned Adorno, "because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids."

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.

FOOLING WITH DISASTER?

Startling revelations about Three Mile Island disaster raise doubts over nuclear plant safety.

Source: Institute For Southern Studies
Second Source Wikipedia
It was April Fool's Day, 1979 -- 30 years ago this week -- when Randall Thompson first set foot inside the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa. Just four days earlier, in the early morning hours of March 28, a relatively minor problem in the plant's Unit 2 reactor sparked a series of mishaps that led to the meltdown of almost half the uranium fuel and uncontrolled releases of radiation into the air and surrounding Susquehanna River.



It was the single worst disaster ever to befall the U.S. nuclear power industry, and Thompson was hired as a health physics technician to go inside the plant and find out how dangerous the situation was. He spent 28 days monitoring radiation releases.

Today, his story about what he witnessed at Three Mile Island is being brought to the public in detail for the first time -- and his version of what happened during that time, supported by a growing body of other scientific evidence, contradicts the official U.S. government story that the Three Mile Island accident posed no threat to the public.

"What happened at TMI was a whole lot worse than what has been reported," Randall Thompson told Facing South. "Hundreds of times worse."

Thompson and his wife, Joy, a nuclear health physicist who also worked at TMI in the disaster's aftermath, claim that what they witnessed there was a public health tragedy. The Thompsons also warn that the government's failure to acknowledge the full scope of the disaster is leading officials to underestimate the risks posed by a new generation of nuclear power plants.

While new reactor construction ground to a halt after the 1979 incident, state leaders and energy executives today are pushing for a nuclear energy revival that's centered in the South, where 12 of the 17 facilities seeking new reactors are located.

Fundamental to the industry's case for expansion is the claim that history proves nuclear power is clean and safe -- a claim on which the Thompsons and others, bolstered by startling new evidence, are casting doubt.

An unlikely critic

Randall Thompson could never be accused of being a knee-jerk anti-nuclear alarmist. A veteran of the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine program, he is a self-described "nuclear geek" who after finishing military service jumped at the chance to work for commercial nuclear power companies.

He worked for a time at the Peach Bottom nuclear plant south of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania's York County, but quit the industry six months before the TMI disaster over concerns that nuclear companies were cutting corners for higher profits, with potentially dangerous results. Instead, he began publishing a skateboarding magazine with his wife Joy.

But the moment the Thompsons heard about the TMI incident, they wanted to get inside the plant and see what was happening first-hand. That didn't prove difficult: Plant operator Metropolitan Edison's in-house health physics staff fled after the incident began, so responsibility for monitoring radioactive emissions went to a private contractor called Rad Services.

The company immediately hired Randall Thompson to serve as the health physics technician in charge of monitoring radioactive emissions, while Joy Thompson got a job monitoring radiation doses to TMI workers.

"I had other health physicists from around the country calling me saying, 'Don't let it melt without me!" Randall Thompson recalls. "It was exciting. Our attitude was, 'Sure I may get some cancer, but I can find out some cool stuff.'"

What the Thompsons say they found out during their time inside TMI suggests radiation releases from the plant were hundreds if not thousands of times higher than the government and industry have acknowledged -- high enough to cause the acute health effects documented in people living near the plant but that have been dismissed by the industry and the government as impossible given official radiation dose estimates.

The Thompsons tried to draw attention to their findings and provide health information for people living near the plant, but what they say happened next reads like a John Grisham thriller.

They tell of how a stranger approached Randall Thompson in a grocery store parking lot in late April 1979 and warned him his life was at risk, leading the family to flee Pennsylvania. How they ended up in New Mexico working on a book about their experiences with the help of Joy's brother Charles Busey, another nuclear Navy vet and a former worker at the Hatch nuclear power plant in Georgia. How one evening while driving home from the store Busey and Randall Thompson were run off the road, injuring Thompson and killing Busey. How a copy of the book manuscript they were working on was missing from the car's trunk after the accident. These allegations were detailed in several newspaper accounts back in 1981.

Eventually, after a decade of having their lives ruled by TMI, the Thompsons decided to move on. Randall Thompson went to college to study computer science. Joy Thompson returned to publishing and writing.

Today they live quietly in the mountains of North Carolina where, inspired by time spent seeking refuge with a traveling circus, they have forged a new career for themselves as clowns -- or what they like to call "professional fools." As Joy Thompson wrote in the fall 2001 issue of Parabola, a journal of myth, the role of the fool is to help people "perceive the foolishness in even ... the most powerful institutions," noting the medieval court jester's role of telling the King what others dare not.

That conviction has led the Thompsons to tell their story today.

"They haven't told the truth yet about what happened at Three Mile Island," says Randall Thompson. "A lot of people have died because of this accident. A lot."

Anomalies abound

That a lot of people died because of what happened at Three Mile Island, as the Thompsons claim, is definitely not part of the official story. In fact, the commercial nuclear power industry and the government insist that despite the meltdown of almost half of the uranium fuel at TMI, there were only minimal releases of radiation to the environment that harmed no one.

For example, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying group for the U.S. nuclear industry, declares on its website that there have been "no public health or safety consequences from the TMI-2 accident." The government's position is the same, reflected in a fact sheet distributed today by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency charged with overseeing the U.S. nuclear power industry: TMI, it says, "led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community." [The watchdog group Three Mile Island Alert offers their take on the NRC factsheet here.]

Those upbeat claims are based on the findings of the Kemeny Commission, a panel assembled by President Jimmy Carter in April 1979 to investigate the TMI disaster. Using release figures presented by Metropolitan Edison and the NRC, the commission calculated that in the month following the disaster there were releases of up to 13 million curies of so-called "noble gases" -- considered relatively harmless -- but only 13 to 17 curies of iodine-131, a radioactive form of the element that at even moderate exposures causes thyroid cancer. (A curie is a measure of radioactivity, with 1 curie equal to the activity of one gram of radium. For help understanding these and other terms, see the glossary at the end of this piece.)

But the official story that there were no health impacts from the disaster doesn't jibe with the experiences of people living near TMI. On the contrary, their stories suggest that area residents actually suffered exposure to levels of radiation high enough to cause acute effects -- far more than the industry and the government has acknowledged.

Some of their disturbing experiences were collected in the book Three Mile Island: The People's Testament, which is based on interviews with 250 area residents done between 1979 and 1988 by Katagiri Mitsuru and Aileen M. Smith.

It includes the story of Jean Trimmer, a farmer who lived in Lisburn, Pa. about 10 miles west of TMI. On the evening of March 30, 1979, Trimmer stepped outside on her front porch to fetch her cat when she was hit with a blast of heat and rain. Soon after, her skin became red and itchy as if badly sunburned, a condition known as erythema. About three weeks later, her hair turned white and began falling out. Not long after, she reported, her left kidney "just dried up and disappeared" -- an occurrence so strange that her case was presented to a symposium of doctors at the nearby Hershey Medical Center. All of those symptoms are consistent with high-dose radiation exposure.

There was also Bill Peters, an auto-body shop owner and a former justice of the peace who lived just a few miles west of the plant in Etters, Pa. The day after the disaster, he and his son -- who like most area residents were unaware of what was unfolding nearby -- were working in their garage with the doors open when they developed what they first thought was a bad sunburn. They also experienced burning in their throats and tasted what seemed to be metal in the air. That same metallic taste was reported by many local residents and is another symptom of radiation exposure, commonly reported in cancer patients receiving radiation therapy.

Peters soon developed diarrhea and nausea, blisters on his lips and inside his nose, and a burning feeling in his chest. Not long after, he had surgery for a damaged heart valve. When his family evacuated the area a few days later, they left their four-year-old German shepherd in their garage with 200 pounds of dog chow, 50 gallons of water and a mattress. When they returned a week later, they found the dog dead on the mattress, his eyes burnt completely white. His food was untouched, and he had vomited water all over the garage. They also found four of their five cats dead -- their eyes also burnt white -- and one alive but blinded. Peters later found scores of wild bird carcasses scattered over their property.

Similar stories surfaced in The People of Three Mile Island, a book by documentary photographer Robert Del Tredici. He found local farmers whose cattle and goats died, suffered miscarriages and gave birth to deformed young after the incident; whose chickens developed respiratory problems and died; and whose fruit trees abruptly lost all their leaves. Local residents also collected evidence of deformed plants, some of which were examined by James Gunckel, a botanist and radiation expert with Brookhaven National Laboratory and Rutgers University.

"There were a number of anomalies entirely comparable to those induced by ionizing radiation -- stem fasciations, growth stimulation, induction of extra vegetative buds and stem tumors," he swore in a 1984 affidavit.

Scientists say these kinds of anomalies simply aren't explained by official radiation release estimates.

Evidence of harm

The evidence that people, animals and plants near TMI were exposed to high levels of radiation in the 1979 disaster is not merely anecdotal. While government studies of the disaster as well as a number of independent researchers assert the incident caused no harm, other surveys and studies have also documented health effects that point to a high likelihood of significant radiation exposures.

In 1984, for example, psychologist Marjorie Aamodt and her engineer husband, Norman -- owners of an organic dairy farm east of Three Mile Island who got involved in a lawsuit seeking to stop TMI from restarting its Unit 1 reactor -- surveyed residents in three hilltop neighborhoods near the plant. Dozens of neighbors reported a metallic taste, nausea, vomiting and hair loss as well as illnesses including cancers, skin and reproductive problems, and collapsed organs -- all associated with radiation exposure. Among the 450 people surveyed, there were 19 cancer deaths reported between 1980 and 1984 -- more than seven times what would be expected statistically.

That survey came to the attention of the industry-financed TMI Public Health Fund, created in 1981 as part of a settlement for economic losses from the disaster. The fund's scientific advisors verified the Aamodts' calculations and launched a more comprehensive study of TMI-related cancer deaths led by a team of scientists from Columbia University. The researchers found an association between estimated radiation doses received by area residents and instances of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, lung cancer, leukemia and all cancers combined. Crucially, however, the researchers decided there wasn't "convincing evidence" that TMI radiation releases were linked to the increase in cancers in the area because of the "low estimates of radiation exposure." The paper did not consider what conclusions could be drawn if those "low estimates" turned out to be wrong.

By the time the Columbia research was published in the early 1990s, a class-action lawsuit was underway involving about 2,000 plaintiffs claiming that the radiation emissions were much larger than admitted by the government and industry. (The federal courts eventually rejected that suit, though hundreds of out-of-court settlements totaling millions of dollars have been reached with victims, including the parents of children born with birth defects.)

Consulting for the plaintiffs' attorneys, the Aamodts contacted Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health in Chapel Hill to provide support for the plaintiffs. Dr. Wing was reluctant to get involved because -- as he wrote in a 2003 paper about his experience -- "allegations of high radiation doses at TMI were considered by mainstream radiation scientists to be a product of radiation phobia or efforts to extort money from a blameless industry." But impressed with the Aamodts' compelling if imperfect evidence, Wing agreed to look at whether there were connections between radiation exposure from TMI and cancer rates.

Wing reanalyzed the Columbia scientists' data, looking at cancer rates before the TMI disaster to control for other possible risk factors in the 10-mile area. His peer-reviewed results, published in 1997, found positive relationships between accident dose estimates and rates of leukemia, lung cancer and all cancers. Where the Columbia study found a 30 percent average increase in lung cancer risk among one group of residents, for example, Wing found an 85 percent increase. And while the Columbia researchers found little or no increase in adult leukemias and a statistically unreliable increase in childhood cases, Wing found that people downwind during the most intense releases were eight to 10 times more likely on average than their neighbors to develop leukemia.

Dr. Wing reflected on his findings at a symposium in Harrisburg marking the 30-year anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster last week.

"I believe this is very good evidence that releases were thousands of times greater than the story we've been told," he said. "As we think about the current plans to open more nuclear reactors, when we hear -- which we hear often -- that no one was harmed at Three Mile Island, we really should question that."

Documenting discrepancies

Randall and Joy Thompson couldn't agree more. If anything, they think Dr. Wing's findings understate the impact of Three Mile Island because they're based on low-ball estimates of radiation releases.

"Given what he was allowed to know or could figure out, he did a slam-bang job of it," Joyce Thompson says.

In 1995, the Thompsons -- with the help of another health physics expert who was also hired to monitor radiation after the TMI disaster, David Bear (formerly Bloombaum) - prepared a report analyzing the Kemeny Commission findings. Their research, which hasn't been covered by any major media, documents a series of inconsistencies and omissions in the government's account.

For example, the official story is that the TMI incident released only 13 to 17 curies of dangerous iodine into the outside environment, a tiny fraction of the 13 million curies of less dangerous radioactive gases officials say were released, primarily xenon. Such a number would seem small compared with, for example, the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, which released anywhere from 13 million to 40 million curies of iodine and is linked to 50,000 cases of thyroid cancer, according to World Health Organization estimates.

But the Thompsons and Bear point out that the commission's own Technical Assessment Task Force, in a separate volume, had concluded that iodine accounted for 8 to 12 percent of the total radioactive gases leaked from Three Mile Island. Conservatively assuming the 13 million curie figure was the total amount of radioactive gases released rather than just the xenon portion, and then using the Task Force's own 8 to 12 percent estimate of the proportion that was iodine, they point out that "the actual figure for Iodine release would be over 1 million curies" -- a much more substantial public health threat.

In another instance, the Kemeny Commission claimed that there were 7.5 million curies of iodine present in TMI's primary loop, the contained system that delivers cooling water to the reactor. But a laboratory analysis done on March 30 found a higher concentration of iodine in the reactor water, which would put the total amount of iodine present -- and which could potentially leak into the environment -- at 7.65 million curies.

"Thus, while the apparent difference between 7.5 and 7.65 seems inconsiderable at first glance," the Thompson/Bear report states, "this convenient rounding off served to 'lose' a hundred and fifty thousand curies of radioactive Iodine."

They also offer evidence of atmospheric releases of dangerously long-lived radioactive particles such as cesium and strontium -- releases denied by the Kemeny Commission but indicated in the Thompsons' own post-disaster monitoring and detailed in the report -- and show that there were pathways for the radiation to escape into the environment. They demonstrate that the plant's radiation filtration system was totally inadequate to handle the large amounts of radiation released from the melted fuel and suggest that the commission may have arbitrarily set release estimates at levels low enough to make the filtration appear adequate.

Shockingly, they also report that when readings from the dosimeters used to monitor radiation doses to workers and the public were logged, doses of beta radiation -- one of three basic types along with alpha and gamma -- were simply not recorded, which Joy Thompson knew since she did the recording. But Thompson's monitoring equipment also indicated that beta radiation represented about 90 percent of the radiation to which TMI's neighbors were exposed in April 1979, which means an enormous part of the disaster's public health risk may have been wiped from the record.

Finally, in a separate analysis the Thompsons point to discrepancies in government and industry accounts of the disaster that suggest the TMI Unit 2 suffered a scram failure -- that is, a breakdown of the emergency shutoff system. That would mean the nuclear reaction spiraled out of control and therefore posed a much greater danger than the official story allows.

The Thompsons aren't the only ones who have produced evidence that the radiation releases from TMI were much higher than the official estimates. Arnie Gundersen -- a nuclear engineer and former nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower -- has done his own analysis, which he shared for the first time at a symposium in Harrisburg last week.

"I think the numbers on the NRC's website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000," he said.

Exactly how much radiation was released is impossible to say, since onsite monitors immediately went off the scale after the explosion. But Gundersen points to an inside report by an NRC manager who himself estimated the release of about 36 million curies -- almost three times as much as the NRC's official estimate. Gundersen also notes that industry itself has acknowledged there was a total of 10 billion curies of radiation inside the reactor containment. Using the common estimate that a tenth of it escaped, that means as much as a billion curies could have been released to the environment.

Gundersen also offered compelling evidence based on pressure monitoring data from the plant that shortly before 2 p.m. on March 28, 1979 there was a hydrogen explosion inside the TMI containment building that could have released significant amounts of radiation to the environment. The NRC and industry to this day deny there was an explosion, instead referring to what happened as a "hydrogen burn." But Gundersen noted that affidavits from four reactor operators confirm that the plant manager was aware of a dramatic pressure spike after which the internal pressure dropped to outside pressure; he also noted that the control room shook and doors were blown off hinges. In addition, Gundersen reported that while Metropolitan Edison would have known about the pressure spike immediately from monitoring equipment, it didn't notify the NRC about what had happened until two days later.

Gundersen maintains under the NRC's own rules an evacuation should have been ordered on the disaster's first day, when calculated radiation exposures in the town of Goldsboro, Pa. were as high as 10 rems an hour compared to an average cumulative annual background dose of about 0.125 rems. No evacuation order was ever issued, though Gov. Dick Thornburgh did issue an evacuation advisory on March 30 for pregnant women and preschool children within 5 miles of the plant. The government also did not distribute potassium iodide to the public, which would have protected people from the health-damaging effects of radioactive iodine.

Lessons for the future?

When asked by Facing South to respond to these allegations, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not address them directly, instead stating that it continues to stand by the Kemeny Commission report. The NRC further insists that the radiation releases from Three Mile Island had only "negligible effects" on the physical health of humans and the environment, citing other reports from federal agencies [For a PDF of the NRC's response to Facing South, see here.]

But Gundersen and the Thompsons argue such claims don't address new findings at odds with the government's account.

"I believe [the] data shows releases from TMI were significantly greater than reported by the federal government," Gundersen says.

They also say their findings that releases were potentially much larger have important ramifications for current plans to expand the nuclear power industry.

With more than $18 billion in federal subsidies at stake, 17 companies are seeking federal licenses to build a total of 26 nuclear reactors across the country, the first applications since the 1979 disaster. The Atlanta-based Southern Co. plans to begin site work this summer for two new reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia, where state lawmakers recently approved legislation forcing ratepayers to foot the bill for those facilities up front. Florida and South Carolina residents have also begun paying new utility charges to finance planned reactors, USA Today reports. Plans are in the works as well for new reactors in Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Harold Denton, a retired NRC official who worked in Three Mile Island during the crisis, recently told Greenwire that changes made after the 1979 disaster "significantly reduced the overall risks of a future serious accident." But the Thompsons and Gundersen point out that the standards the NRC is applying to the new generation of nuclear plants are influenced by assumptions about what happened at Three Mile Island. They say the NRC's low estimates of radiation exposure have resulted in inadequate requirements for safety and containment protocols as well as the size of the evacuation zones around nuclear plants.

Other nuclear watchdogs have also raised concerns that the NRC's standards for protection against severe accidents like TMI remain inadequate. In a December 2007 report titled "Nuclear Power in a Warming World," the Union of Concerned Scientists notes that the worst accident the current generation of reactors was designed to withstand involves only partial melting of the reactor core but no breach of containment. And the NRC requires operators of plants found to be vulnerable to severe accidents to fix the problem "only if a cost-benefit analysis shows that the financial benefit of a safety backfit - determined by assigning a dollar value to the number of projected cancer deaths that would result from a severe accident - outweighs the cost of fixing the problem," the report states.

Given their personal experiences, the Thompsons warn that we may be fooling ourselves into believing nuclear power is safer than evidence and history suggest.

"Once you realize how deep and broad the realignment of facts about TMI has been, it becomes really pretty amazing," Randall Thompson says. "I guess that's what it takes to protect this industry."

An "-isms" arms race is under way in America.

The author Karl Frisch is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, research, and information center in Washington, D.C.

Turn on cable news or talk radio and you're likely to hear a conservative host, right-wing pundit, or Republican elected official accuse President Obama and the Democratic Congress of just about every "-ism" in the book.

Socialism, Marxism, Leninism, fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism -- few, if any, "-isms" have been spared as the right escalates its daily verbal assault on the progressive agenda.

In fact, according to a search of broadcasts on TVEyes.com, since Obama's inauguration in January, these terms and others like them have been thrown around on cable news at least 3,000 times. Add conservative talk radio and the nation's newspaper op-ed pages to the mix and watch that figure grow like a well-watered, limited edition Bill O'Reilly Chia Pet.

Take the third most-listened-to radio voice in America, San Francisco's Michael Savage, who recently called Obama "a neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making." That's one of the kinder things Savage has said of the president during his daily three-hour hatefest. He's also claimed that the "radical left," including Obama, "dream[s]" of "Maoist revolution" with "death camps" and that Obama appointees "actually have almost the same exact policies as the Nazi Party did."

Then there's Fox News' "-ism" king, Sean Hannity, who has dubbed the United States under Obama the "United States of France" (bonus points for bringing up the dreaded French) and the president himself "commissar-in-chief." Hannity, who hates to pass up an opportunity to advance GOP talking points, has even applauded congressional Republicans for finally using the "S-word." He's also said the Obama administration "is on a mission to hijack capitalism in favor of collectivism. ... The Bolsheviks have already arrived." He opened one recent show by declaring, "Day number 52 of the socialism that you've been waiting for." At least he can count. Spelling, on the other hand, doesn't appear to be Hannity's strong suit. His Red-baiting blood runs so -- well, red, I guess, that his program recently misspelled "comrades" in on-air graphics.

The same folks who've likened progressive policy initiatives to communism have gone on to accuse the president and other Democrats of "McCarthyism." The bizarre nature of this historical comparison is apparently lost on those making the charge. It would be a bit like practicing magic days before kicking off a witch hunt. Hocus-pocus, indeed.

No issue incurs the wrath of these modern-day Red hunters more than health-care reform. For more than 75 years, conservatives have smeared progressive attempts to reform our faltering health-care system as "socialized medicine."

Let's get one thing straight. Anyone who argues that progressive health-care reform initiatives amount to "socialized medicine" is being disingenuous at best. At worst, they lack a basic understanding of what "socialized medicine" really is.

Simply put, health-care reform that leaves the for-profit health insurance industry intact, reform that leaves doctors and other medical professionals free to offer their services outside of a government system, reform that leaves citizens free to choose a private health-care plan over a government plan simply can't be described honestly as "socialized medicine."

As the Urban Institute put it last year, "socialized medicine involves government financing and direct provision of health care services," and therefore, progressive health-care reform proposals do not "fit this description."

That is correct, of course, but that hasn't stopped conservatives from claiming otherwise for decades. Since the 1930s, conservatives have assailed at least 16 different progressive health-care reform initiatives as "socialized medicine" or as a step that would inevitably lead in that direction.

What exactly has constituted "socialized medicine" to conservatives over the past seven-plus decades?

How about Franklin Roosevelt's consideration of government health insurance when crafting the 1935 bill that created Social Security, or Lyndon Johnson's 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act establishing Medicare? Both raised the ire of conservatives, who were quick to run with the "socialized medicine" smear.

In fact, back in 1964, Ronald Reagan, then stumping for GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, said of Medicare, "Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients."

Like Roosevelt and Johnson decades before him, Bill Clinton's health-care initiative in 1993 and 1994 and his work to create the State Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997 were attacked time and again as "socialized medicine."

Pick a progressive president. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, and now Obama -- they've all faced the stale "socialized medicine" routine from the right.

Will it get any better in the weeks and months ahead as Congress debates the president's budget, which will reportedly seek to reform health care? I'm not holding my breath. My own political pessim-ism? More like real-ism with an eye toward history.

Mohammed cartoon row blights race for new Nato chief

To conclude that Turkey does not fit in the European Union we can calculate how difficult it is to have Turkey in the Nato.


Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen (left) talks to Albanian president Bamir Tipo at the 2010 World Cup qualifying match between Denmark and Albania in Copenhagen April 1, 2009.

Hopes of a grand announcement of the new Nato chief this week look set to be dashed because of Turkish opposition to the front-runner.
Until recently, Denmark's charismatic prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen looked set to waltz into the job to succeed the current secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, when his term runs out in July. But Turkey, Nato's only predominantly Muslim member, is now blocking plans to name the 56-year-old Dane during the alliance's upcoming 60th birthday summit, calling his candidacy "unacceptable" because of the cartoon crisis. Rasmussen famously refused to apologize for caricatures of the prophet Mohammed when they were printed in a Danish newspaper in 2006, triggering violent riots in several Muslim countries. A Nato diplomat, who asked not to be named, said allies were now scrambling to secure Turkey's backing during last-minute negotiations ahead of a mega-summit hosted by France and Germany in the Rhineland, due to be attended by US president Barack Obama. "All is not lost, we hope the Turks will give in at the very last moment and we can still make it by Saturday," he said. "But it's looking a lot harder now than a week ago."

Image problem
Denmark has some 700 troops in Afghanistan, mostly battling Taliban insurgents in Helmand, and although Rasmussen has secured broad support from Nato allies on both sides of the Atlantic, Turkish concerns over his image are being echoed privately by other countries, which point to the need to secure maximum Muslim support as part of the Nato's Afghan mission.
Aside from the cartoon controversy, Rasmussen has also spoken out against Turkish membership of the EU and in favour of Kurdish separatists. "The point that people are making is that Nato needs a new face with the Muslim world and all the issues that Denmark has faced in recent years will not help," says Dan Hamilton, director of the Washington-based Center for Transatlantic Relations. "I don't think it's anything to do with him personally, because his credentials are impeccable. But it is a point that does need considering."
In a sign that he might be bracing for a Turkish veto, Rasmussen recently suggested that he might not even interested in the post, though he has also never denied speculation that he was a candidate.

Polish risk
The candidacy of the second-favorite, the Polish foreign minister, has also run aground because of his outspoken views on Russia. Radoslaw Sikorski, a loquacious former journalist, has the backing of fellow former Warsaw Pact nations such as Slovakia and Hungary, but many others fret that relations with Russia could take a turn for the worse under his leadership. Although Siskorski has recently toned down his rhetoric, even going as far as suggesting Russia could one day join Nato, Warsaw's willingness to host a US missile shield could bar his path. "His previous position on things like the planned missile shield and his views Russia makes him a very problematic candidate," says Dan Korski from the European Council on Foreign Relations.
That leaves Canada's defence minister Peter MacKay, who should not even be a candidate in the first place because of the time-honored rule that the secretary general post goes to a European and the top military post to an American. "But Nato is very good at breaking rules," says Herman Schaper, the Dutch Ambassador to Nato. "So if the Canadian candidate is good, there is nothing to say he could not get it." Although many feel it is time to reward Canada's strong role in Nato, MacKay stands only a slim chance.
Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Stoere may end up a safe compromise choice, but he is handicapped as Norway is not a member of the EU. Nato may well chose to postpone the announcement and wait for Obama's visit to Turkey next week, when it is hoped he will proffer sweeteners to cajole Ankara into accepting Rasmussen. But whoever takes on the job carries an enormous big burden: to get more public and government support for the mission in Afghanistan in order to turn it into a success.

Nicolas Sarkozy: Regulate All Finance

LONDON -- For the second time in only five months, the leaders of the world's top 20 economies are meeting to seek a joint response to the unprecedented global economic crisis that we are going through.

Since this crisis first began, I have advocated the idea that, when faced by a challenge of this magnitude, cooperation is a necessity, not an option. Already in September 2008, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, I called upon the world to rally together to meet the crisis with a response based on coordination and cooperation. Brought forward in concert by the European nations, that initiative led to last November's G-20 meeting of heads of state and government in Washington, which laid the foundations for far-reaching reform of the international financial system. The London Summit must now enable us to go further, and to put into practice the principles that we established in Washington.

The world expects that we speed up the reform of the international financial system. The world expects that we rebuild, together, a new form of capitalism, better regulated, with a greater sense of morality and solidarity. This is a precondition for mobilizing the economy and achieving sustainable growth.

This crisis is not the crisis of capitalism. On the contrary, it is the crisis of a system that has drifted away from the most fundamental values of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system that drove financial operators to be increasingly reckless in the risks they took, that allowed banks to speculate instead of doing their proper business of funding growth in the economy; a system, lastly, that tolerated a complete lack of control over the activities of so many financial players and markets.

At the Washington summit last November, we agreed on the four principles that would guide our response to the crisis: the need for enhanced coordination and cooperation, the rejection of protectionist measures, the strengthening of regulatory systems in financial markets, and a new global governance.

What has been achieved to date? On the first two points, we have made a good deal of progress. We have managed to hold off the specter of protectionism, which, as history has taught us, inevitably compounds existing difficulties. Likewise, all nations have injected massive support for their economies, engaging in ambitious stimulus programs, while those countries that, like France, offer their citizens a high level of social protection have also significantly increased their levels of crisis-related welfare spending. Overall, taking into account all of these measures of support, the world's leading economies have made comparably gigantic efforts in response to the crisis. These measures are only now beginning to take effect and produce tangible benefits, but we must be ready to do even more if circumstances require it.

This is the principle I will be defending in London: to do everything necessary for world growth.
This week, however, we must also attach the same level of priority and sense of urgency to making progress on the issue of regulation of financial markets. World growth will be all the stronger for being sustained by a stable, efficient financial system and by the kind of renewed confidence in the markets that will enable resources to be better allocated, encourage lending to pick up again and allow the return of the flow of private investment capital toward developing countries.

The Washington Summit enabled the establishment of several basic principles regarding regulation that must now be put into practical effect. We decided that in the future not one financial player, not one institution, not one product would be beyond the control of a regulatory authority. This rule must be applied to credit rating agencies, but it should also apply to speculative investment funds and, of course, to tax havens.

On the latter point I want us to go very far indeed, adopting a resolution that clearly identifies these tax havens and sets out in detail both the changes we expect them to introduce and the consequences that will ensue, should they fail to respond accordingly. I may add that I am pleased to observe that the debate on tax havens initiated by the Washington Summit has already begun to bear fruit, in particular in Europe, where several countries have recently announced their intention to introduce legislative changes in response to the expectations of the international community.

I also hope that we will make progress with our joint reflection on the necessary reform of the required disclosure standards and levels of prudential oversight for financial firms. The current regulations failed to prevent abuses. They even made the crisis worse. I shall be putting this aspect to the fore, since sadly in many countries it has not been getting the attention it deserves.

With regard to the reform of global economic governance, it is my long-standing belief that we must offer much more space to emerging nations, in keeping with their real weight and with the responsibilities I would like to see them taking on. This holds true for all international bodies, but especially so for international financial institutions. I am particularly pleased by the expanded membership of the Financial Stability Forum. We must go even further in the future.
Looking beyond the London Summit, in my view there will remain the task of pursuing a process of renewal throughout the entire multilateral system. I shall be making some proposals in this regard over the coming months.

Lastly, we must provide answers to the problems of those who have been hit hardest by the impact of the crisis. This is why we must raise the level of funding we make available to the International Monetary Fund, so that it can aid those countries facing the most serious difficulties. I have taken up at the EU level the question of our contribution to the IMF: The Member States were ready and willing. I have also taken up at the EU level the question of our contribution to the risks that certain countries in Central and Eastern Europe are exposed to: Again, the Member States were ready and willing.

I would also like to emphasize the need, the absolute necessity, for us to offer our support to the poorer nations. They are the victims of this crisis. Some now face the real risk of seeing their considerable efforts in recent years toward achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals be completely nullified, if we do not show solidarity. A few days ago I was in Africa. While there, I stated my belief that the destinies of Europe and the African continent are inextricably linked. We will be ready and willing to stand by Africa and by all developing nations in difficulty, on every continent.

I remain convinced that the world can emerge from these troubled times stronger, more united and with a greater sense of solidarity than before, provided we have the will to do so. I am fully aware that we cannot achieve radical change overnight, that there is still a long way to go and that there may well be a need for other meetings, after London, in order to implement the reforms undertaken. I am certain, however, of the need to achieve practical results already this Thursday in London. Failure is not an option; the world would not understand it and History would not forgive us for it.

Torture... Where is the Outrage?

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

.

Geithner pushes his financial reforms on Capitol Hill

The Treasury secretary’s plan aims to rein in the industry’s boom-bust cycle and soothe Europe ahead of the G-20 summit. The push to remake the financial industry’s rules of the road in hopes of softening future boom-and-bust cycles gathered momentum this week with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner urging Congress Thursday to create new systems to monitor and control risks.
So far in the financial crisis, Washington has acted mainly to contain the immediate damage to the economy. But any deeper fixes could also yield results quickly.
By signaling a receptivity to increased regulation – a key European demand – the announcement might strengthen President Obama’s ability to nudge Germany and other nations on a US priority at next week’s meeting of the Group of 20 leaders: expanding government spending as an economic stimulus.

Federal agencies would also have new authority to intervene at large, troubled financial institutions like AIG if parts of Mr. Geithner’s plan are enacted into law.
Longer term, clarifying potential reforms could lift economic confidence. “It is important, because, let’s face it, we got into this because of regulatory issues,” says David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York. “It’s not going to be easy.”

Among the controversial points that Congress will wrestle with: What body should be empowered to be the watchdog of major risks to the financial system?
One leading candidate for the job is the Federal Reserve. But the Fed already has the major mission of setting monetary policy – and being a so-called lender of last resort in financial crises. Also, the Fed is coming in for its share of criticism in Congress lately for some of its actions during the crisis.
An alternative is to set up a new entity to do the job. Either way, this new role would come on top of – not as a replacement for – other agencies overseeing parts of the financial industry.

Geithner’s goals
Appearing before the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday, Mr. Geithner outlined key goals for regulatory reform. “The system proved too unstable and fragile, subject to significant crises every few years, periodic booms in real-estate markets and in credit, followed by busts,” Geithner said. “These failures have caused a great loss of confidence in … a system that over time has been a tremendous asset for the American economy.”
He outlined four broad areas reforms will cover. They include protecting consumers and investors, eliminating gaps in the regulatory structure, and enhancing the coordination of rules in a more global economy.

Systemic risk
The fourth area of reform, addressing “systemic risk,” was his focus Thursday. He proposed:

•Naming a single entity to track systemic stability across all sectors of financial activity.
•Creating a resolution mechanism for important nonbank firms, so that they can be assisted or shut down, if needed, outside of traditional bankruptcy.
•Tightening the capital requirements for large financial firms so that they would rein in cyclical tendencies. During a boom, firms would have to set aside more reserves, as a way to curb excesses and provide a cushion for bad times.
•Requiring large hedge funds and other private-investment funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and be more transparent to regulators regarding their leverage – or borrowing – and risk.
•Establishing oversight and protections for investments known as derivatives, such as the credit-default swaps that fueled AIG’s collapse.
•Crafting SEC rules to make money-market funds safer, reducing the risk that account holders would panic or face losses in a crisis.

Geithner is the point man in a larger effort by the Obama administration to clarify these goals. Other officials, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, have urged similar steps this month. Mr. Bernanke said the AIG failure could have been handled in a less costly way had the government had the authority to deal with troubled nonbank firms the way the the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) deals with failed banks. If other firms falter, such authority might prove useful to regulators before this recession is over.

Regulatory reform can be viewed as the final piece of an overall plan that, Geithner says, will succeed over time in ending the credit crisis. When a congressman asked him earlier this week about the whether a Plan B was needed, Geithner responded confidently. “This plan will work,” he said. “We just need to keep at it.”

Where this fits in
There are other parts of the plan, which have been announced in recent weeks. They include reviving the housing market by preventing foreclosures and keeping interest rates low, investing in weak banks so they have enough capital to cope with loan losses, and developing a public-private partnership to buy troubled bank assets that have been a cause of investor uncertainty.

After months of worsening economic news, some recent data have made economists optimistic that the economy may hit bottom later this year. Housing-market news has been less grim, and buyers may be encouraged not only by a first-time buyer’s tax credit, but also by mortgage rates that this week fell to historic lows below 5 percent on 30-year fixed-rate loans.
Meanwhile, the stock market has risen strongly this month, and consumer spending has shown signs of stabilizing after a winter plunge. But it remains unclear whether the Geithner plan will work, and whether banks will be healthy enough to help fuel a strong economic recovery. Mr. Wyss of S&P, for one, doesn’t share Geithner’s level of confidence that current policies will be effective. But “I’m feeling a little more confident today than I was a month ago,” he says.
Financial experts say that moves to improve the regulatory structure should help the functioning of an industry that plays a vital role in the economy – and that has proved subject to abuses. One key step, they say, is to make sure that rules do better at covering broad types of activity across a range of firms. The worst excesses in mortgage lending, for example, arose among less-regulated mortgage brokers with mainstream banks playing a supporting or follow-on role. Another key could be to reform how bankers are paid and given incentives. Geithner made brief reference to compensation, but this is a tricky issue for Congress to address. The goal might be to set guidelines so that pay depends on managing and reducing risks as well as achieving profit goals.