First, turning to the program segment on Three Mile Island , the most striking thing here is that (1) people died, contrary to industry propaganda, (2) there has never been a full investigation and accounting for the harm suffered as a result, (3) there has never been a legal accounting for the harm suffered as a result. In short, the containment vessel at TMI may not have functioned properly, but the nuclear industry's containment of the political fallout from TMI has been nothing short of astonishing:
AMY GOODMAN: The accident at Three Mile Island fueled the nuclear debate in this country that continues to rage to this day.
We're joined now by Democracy Now! video stream by anti-nuclear activist and editor of nukefree.org, Harvey Wasserman.
Harvey, welcome to Democracy Now! On this eve of the thirtieth anniversary of Three Mile Island, what do you think it's most important for people to understand? There are some people listening right now who weren't even born in 1979.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: What's important to understand is that people were killed in this accident. The nuclear industry continues to spread the lie that no one was harmed. In fact, nobody knows how much radiation escaped from Three Mile Island. Nobody knows where it went. And nobody knows what the impact was.
I went into the central Pennsylvania area a year after the accident, and I conducted dozens of interviews with people who were clearly harmed by the radiation from the accident. There were cancers, leukemias, birth defects, stillbirths, hair loss, unexplained lesions, rashes. It was like being in the middle of a post-Hiroshima nightmare.
And the reality is that the nuclear industry continues to deny that anyone was harmed, and all the serious indicators show that, in fact, people were harmed. There's a 2,400-person-or-family, rather-class-action lawsuit that was filed in the 1980s that's still pending. The federal court system will not allow the people of central Pennsylvania to have an official hearing on the health impacts of this accident. And yet, the industry, which wants to build new reactors, continues to spread the lie that no one was killed at Three Mile Island. It's utterly false.
Got that? A stalled 2,400-family class-action lawsuit, filed in the 1980s that's still pending.
Justice? You've got to be kidding!
Another news flash: Governments lie!
JUAN GONZALEZ: Harvey, I was a young reporter, actually, at the Philadelphia Daily News in 1979 when the accident occurred, and I remember vividly the debates in the newsroom among the reporters as to whether they would want to go and cover it, because they had to travel to Three Mile Island, which was about a couple of hours' drive away. And the thing that struck me most was the lesson I learned-the greatest lesson I learned is that in major accidents and crises like this, you cannot depend on government officials to tell you the truth, because they kept changing the story, day after day, as to the nature of the release. And as you say, there's still not a clear sense of what the extent of the release was. What has been the continuing health effects on the communities closest to the accident, as far as you can tell?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, in fact, there's just been two new studies released in Harrisburg this week. One indicates that as much as a hundred times more radiation escaped than the government and the industry have been willing to admit. And the other is that the statistics clearly show ongoing problems of cancer, leukemia, other radiation-related diseases. The fact of the matter is that the country-this is the best-known, the most infamous industrial accident in US history, and yet the industry and the government refuse to get to the bottom of the situation.
You should count yourself lucky that you didn't go there. Many journalists who did go to central Pennsylvania suffered significant harm. The radiation releases were very, very significant. And, in fact, Walter Cronkite was wrong. The experts said there was no possibility of an explosion; there was a possibility of an explosion, because there was a hydrogen bubble inside the reactor.
So, the accident at Three Mile Island is ongoing. We will never have closure until the people who sued, the central Pennsylvanians, the 2,400 families, get a day in court. The federal courts still say that not enough radiation was released to cause any harm, but they don't know how much radiation was released. In fact, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has admitted they don't know how much radiation was released. And they certainly don't know where it went. And every indication is that the health damage was significant and that people were killed at Three Mile Island.
Against this bleak scenario, the story of the Exxon Valdez disaster is almost a happy one. Sure, thousands of livers were ruined, but at least there's a strong, self-conscious group of survivors, and they even got their case taken all the way to the Supreme Court-where the (we're not really) activist judges slashed the judgment against Exxon to one tenth of the original jury award. It's not surprising, therefore, that one of the principle activists involved, interviewed here in this segment, has turned her attention to overturning the underlying foundations of corporation law-similarly created out of thin air by conservative activist judges over 120 years ago.
First up is the direct devastation of wildlife-including that which the people depended on for their livelihood, most notably, the total collapse of the herring fishery, which has yet to recover:
AMY GOODMAN: How many animals died?
RIKI OTT: There was up to half a million seabirds, up to 5,000 sea otters, 300 or so harbor seals, billions of young salmon and herring fish eggs and young juvenile fish. And this was a problem, because it created a delayed impact. I mean, when you take out eggs, you don't really see the impact until those eggs should have become adults and joined the adult population. That's what we saw with herring. The crash didn't happen until 1993, four years later, when the young of the in '89 failed to materialize.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what happened to the herring industry? How extensive was it?
RIKI OTT: Well, the salmon and the herring both collapsed, because they were spawned on these beaches, these oiled beaches. Salmon-and this was '92, '93. This is delayed, delayed harm. Salmon gradually came back, but herring never did. And this is a huge problem, not only for the ecosystem, but also for the economy. Herring are the main forage fish of the ecosystem of the Prince William Sound, so whales, sea lions, seabirds, everything depends on herring. Without herring, realistically, we can't expect the sound to recover. And what the scientists are saying now is they have no idea how long it will take for herring to recover.
Meanwhile, the herring fisheries are closed indefinitely. Indefinitely. So the permits that-we pay a limited price for a limited entry permit. It's kind of like buying a home. It's a big price, and you take out a debt, a loan, and then you pay it back every year based on your fishing income. And zero-it's zero income for herring fishermen. So they have incurred a huge debt on this permit. And it's really the debt that's eating us alive now-$300,000. And these permits are worth now about $15,000. I mean-
Then there's the economic devastation, which even lead one of the mayors to commit suicide, and, after years of being lied to by Exxon, finally the turn to a lawsuit, and a massive act of civil disobedience to gain the attention of President Clinton, which was necessary to finally get scientific studies started, five years after the disaster:
AMY GOODMAN: The mayor committed suicide?
RIKI OTT: One of our mayors, right after the spill, he did, and it was 1993, when the fish runs were collapsing. And I literally-I call that year as bad as it gets. Up to that point, we had been victims. We had been waiting for Exxon to pay us. Exxon promised to make us whole. You know, "You're lucky you have Exxon." We hadn't even gone to court by 1993. We had fish run collapses, bankruptcies, divorces, suicides, you know, domestic violence spikes, substance abuse spikes. The town was just unraveling. And we were waiting for somebody to help us: the State of Alaska, the federal government, the court system, Exxon. Nobody. And-
AMY GOODMAN: There were 33,000 plaintiffs.
RIKI OTT: There are 32,000 claims, 22,000 plaintiffs. Some people had multiple fishing permits, so salmon fishing, herring fishing, so they would have two claims. And these are people all through twenty-two communities and even as far out as Bristol Bay, because the effect-the price dropped, and there was a price-tainting effect.
So what we did was-the mayor, in our dark hour-it really was our darkest hour-committed suicide. And what we did after the fish run collapse is we did a community-wide act of civil disobedience: we blockaded Valdez Narrows, help up oil tanker traffic. This was to bring attention to Prince William Sound. Everything was collapsing. Seabirds, marine mammals, fish.
And this got the attention of President Clinton, and he said, "What is it that you fishermen want?" And we said, "We don't want to be fined for civil disobedience. We're desperate. And also, we want ecosystem studies. We want the scientists to connect the dots between the seabirds, the marine mammals, the fish, the beaches. What happened to Prince William Sound?"
Those ecosystem studies began in 1994, really too late for our trial. They didn't get completed until about 2004-I'm talking about published papers now. And those studies show, sure enough, the oil that's remaining on our beaches is still causing harm....
Next, Ott talks about the underlying crisis in democracy that she and the other plaintiffs discovered in the course of their struggle:
AMY GOODMAN: You've said that is not just an environmental disaster, but a crisis in democracy.
RIKI OTT: It is a democracy crisis. The question we started asking as our lawsuit went on and on and on, and we didn't get paid, was how did corporations get this big, where they can manipulate the legal system, the political system? What happened here? And I thought that was a really good question, so I went to answer it. And that became the final chapter of Not One Drop.
And I learned from other people's work that there's actually two ways to amend the Constitution. One is formally, through people-made law, which we've done twenty-seven times. And one is informally, through what Thomas Jefferson called the engine of consolidation, the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court.
And in 1886, the Supreme Court made sort of a seminal decision, where it granted a railroad corporation equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, which is, of course, a civil rights amendment for due process and equal protection for African American men. For the first forty years after that passed, there were 307 lawsuits brought, nineteen by African American men, the rest by corporations.
And at that point, when the Fourteenth Amendment passed to corporations, this thing called a corporate person arose. And that corporate person, in the eyes of the law, is able to access our rights, human rights, the Bill of Rights, constitutional protections. This is wrong. The word "corporation" never appears in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. This is how we've lost freedom of speech. We still-we, as people, still have the First Amendment, but so do corporations. Free speech equals money. Those with more money have more speech. Pretty simple. So I began to understand that the legal system is broken. The election process is broken, all because of the same reason, this corporate personhood....
The bottom line of what this meant for the Exxon Valdez victims was that a carefully considered jury award of $5 billion in punitive damages-a sum that, at the time, actually could have had a salutary deterrent effect on future bad behavior-was slashed to just 10% of that, almost 20 years latter-a mere pittance for the corporate giant that Exxon had become by that time:
AMY GOODMAN: 1994, the jury rules you get $5 billion. What happened?
RIKI OTT: The jury-it took three weeks to come up with that decision. They didn't just pull it out of the air. The jury asked the question: how do we holding a corporation this large accountable to people? And the jury decided they had to tie profit to punishment. So, at the time, 1994, that was one year's net profit for Exxon, $5 billion. And that way, you can hold-you know, big corporation, big punishment.
What the Supreme Court did was they severed that link, and they instead linked profit to damages. Well, there's a problem. We are still incurring ongoing damages in Prince William Sound, because we're not fishing herring, for example, so we didn't get all of our damages. Meanwhile, this one-to-one ratio of punitive to damages sets-is a problem now for everybody in America. We all lost our ability to hold big corporations accountable. This was the threat of unlimited liability. Just the mere threat held these corporations accountable to consumer safety laws, public health laws, environmental protection laws. We've lost that now. What we need is Congress to, what I call, overturn this by taking up the issue of punitive damages and asking the question: how do we hold these large corporations accountable?
AMY GOODMAN: What kind of relief have you gotten at this point, Riki Ott? What have your communities gotten? What has Exxon Mobil paid out?
RIKI OTT: We have gotten ten cents on the dollar. Most of my friends have been able to claim-to receive seven to ten percent of what they have actually lost. At this point in time, twenty years later, I even have some friends whose individual share of that punitive damage award is not-it's less than what they will have to pay their bankruptcy lawyer....
AMY GOODMAN: Riki Ott, I want to thank you for being with us. She has written the book Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. I thank you for joining us.
RIKI OTT: Thank you. And I'm advocating the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to strip corporations of human rights. Thank you.
Thus, clearly, our legal system itself is a menace to the planet, as well as the well-being of any community that happens to be in the way of massive corporate power. |
