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"This is another chapter in a nightmare that won't end," a campaigner said.
The corporation that owns the shuttered nuclear plant on Three Mile Island on Friday announced a deal with Microsoft to reopen the facility to provide power to the tech company for data centers using artificial intelligence.
Three Mile Island is well-known as the site of largest nuclear disaster in U.S. history—a reactor there, Unit 2, partially melted down in 1979. However, the site's other reactor, Unit 1, continued to operate safely until 2019, when it was closed for economic reasons.
With the help of tax breaks from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), plant owner Constellation Energy plans to spend $1.6 billion to restart Unit 1, with all of the power going to Microsoft for the first 20 years. Microsoft and other tech firms use inordinate amounts of energy to power data centers used for AI and have advocated for nuclear as a zero-emissions power source.
Though it doesn't emit carbon, nuclear power's downsides make it the subject of fierce opposition from many environmental and public safety groups.
Friday's deal, combining nuclear power and AI, which also poses great safety risks, was too much for The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, who quipped that "the hellscape of modern life" had been captured in one headline.
Local campaigners vowed to push against the reopening and keep the area free of nuclear activity.
"We will challenge this proposal at every venue that is available for us," Eric Epstein, a former chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, a campaign group, told the Inquirer.
"This is another chapter in a nightmare that won't end," he added.
Siri, define the hellscape of modern life in one headline https://t.co/miQMSWROmp
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) September 20, 2024
Three Mile Island would be the first decommissioned U.S. nuclear plant to reopen, and the first to provide all of its power to one corporation, according to The New York Times. Microsoft and Constellation didn't disclose the financial details of the deal.
About 19% of electricity in the U.S. comes from nuclear power, and a drive for "clean energy," as well as the IRA credits, have spurred growth in the sector. Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates is a vocal proponent and has started his own nuclear company, TerraPower, which is building a plant in Wyoming.
The Three Mile Island project, expected to get the plant back online in 2028, still needs regulatory approval at multiple levels. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has already come out in support of the plan.
A study commissioned by the Pennsylvania Building & Construction Trades Council, which represents more than 115 local unions, found that reopening the plant would create 3,400 direct and indirect jobs, including 600 at the plant itself, which is in the middle of the Susquehanna River, just south of Harrisburg, the state capital. The plant's reopening is seen by some community leaders as the revival of an "economic anchor in a region beset with financial hardship," according to The Washington Post.
Pennsylvania has five active nuclear plants, including two owned by Constellation, whose stock price shot up on Friday morning after the Three Mile Island announcement was made. The company and other industry backers celebrated the symbolic victory of restarting the plant.
"If anything says nuclear power is here to stay and expand, it's Three Mile Island reopening!" Amir Adnani, CEO of Uranium Energy Corp, wrote on social media.
Epstein, the campaigner, said the focus should be finishing the cleanup from the 1979 disaster. About 99% of the Unit 2's fuel has been removed to Idaho, but the last 1% has proven difficult to deal with.
"First things first, remove the waste from the island, and clean up [Unit 2]," Epstein said.
"Exorbitant CEO pay has contributed to rising inequality in recent decades—concentrating earnings at the top and leaving fewer gains for ordinary workers," said one expert at the Economic Policy Institute.
Chief executive officers at the largest companies in the United States saw their compensation surge by 1,085% from 1978 to 2023, compared with only a 24% increase for typical worker pay, according to an annual report published Thursday.
The Economic Policy Insitute (EPI) analysis focuses on the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. firms by revenue.
"Since CEO pay is mostly stock-based—and the value of stocks changes frequently—calculating it is not entirely straightforward," the report explains, so EPI uses "a backward-looking measure—realized compensation—and a forward-looking measure—granted compensation."
CEOs' annual realized compensation in 1978 was $1,874,000 in 1978, but rose to $22,207,000 last year—the 1,085% increase. Meanwhile, private-sector workers were making $57,000 a year nearly half a century ago, and have only seen that rise to $71,000. The figures were adjusted for inflation.
"The realized CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 290-to-1 in 2023, in stark contrast to the 21-to-1 ratio in 1965," the report says. "Over the last two decades, the ratio has been far higher than at any point from the 1960s to the early 1990s."
The report notes some limited progress. Last year's analysis—released amid the United Auto Workers strike at the "Big Three"—found that CEOs made 344 times as much as typical workers. There was a 19% decrease in CEOs' realized compensation from 2022 to 2023. The report also points out positive trends regarding how they are compensated.
"The composition of CEO compensation is shifting away from the use of stock options and toward stock awards—a promising move to align CEO pay to longer-term incentives," the report details. "In 2006, stock options accounted for just over 70% of stock-related pay in realized CEO compensation. But in 2023, stock options made up only 22%, with vested stock awards accounting for the rest. Stock-related pay (exercised stock options and vested stock awards) averaged $16.7 million in 2023 and accounted for 77.6% of average realized CEO compensation."
However, economic justice advocates argue that far more must be done to improve U.S. worker pay and job conditions.
The report highlights "how distorted CEO pay is, even compared with the most privileged workers in the U.S. economy."
EPI researchers found that "CEOs made over 9 times as much in salary as even the most privileged 0.1% of workers in the economy. This 9.4 ratio in 2022 was 6.8 points higher than the historical average of 2.6 over the 1965–1978 period."
"This is a large change, meaning that the relative pay of CEOs increased by an amount equal to the total annual wages of nearly seven of these very high-wage earners," the report states.
As EPI chief economist and report co-author Josh Bivens emphasized, "CEOs are paid so much more because of their extraordinary leverage over corporate boards, not because of an extraordinary skill or contribution they make to their firms."
"Exorbitant CEO pay has contributed to rising inequality in recent decades—concentrating earnings at the top and leaving fewer gains for ordinary workers," he said. "The silver lining in this otherwise unfortunate trend is that CEO pay can be curtailed without damaging economywide growth."
EPI's policy recommendations include implementing higher marginal income tax rates at the very top and hiking corporate tax rates for firms that have higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation.
Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies earlier this year identified 35 major U.S. corporations—including Ford, Netflix, and Tesla—that paid their top executives more than they paid in federal taxes between 2018 and 2022.
The new EPI report stresses that "ideally, tax reforms would be paired with changes in corporate governance."
EPI senior economist and report co-author Elise Gould said that "policies that limit CEOs' ability to collude with corporate boards to extract excessive compensation are needed to prevent the U.S. from becoming a winner-take-all society."
This post has been updated to note that annual compensation figures were adjusted for inflation.
"Our private, profit-driven system means that we are paying more for less," said one progressive activist.
A report out Thursday shows that the United States' for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last among peer nations on key metrics, including access to care and health outcomes such as life expectancy at birth.
The new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund is the latest indictment of a corporate-dominated system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured and unable to afford life-saving medications without rationing doses or going into debt.
"Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents," the report states. "Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier."
People in the U.S., which spends roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as other rich nations, "live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths," Commonwealth noted, pointing to frequent "denials of services by insurance companies" and other systematic defects of the American system, including massive administrative costs.
Meanwhile, insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies are raking in huge profits, benefiting in particular from the growing privatization of Medicare. More than half of the Medicare-eligible population in the U.S. is currently on a privately run Medicare Advantage plan.
"Our private, profit-driven system means that we are paying more for less," progressive activist Jonathan Cohn wrote in response to the Commonwealth report.
The Commonwealth Fund's findings bolster progressives' case for transitioning to a Medicare for All system that would provide comprehensive coverage to everyone in the country for free at the point of service. Studies have repeatedly shown that such a program would cost less than the immensely wasteful for-profit system—which is set to drive national healthcare spending to $7.7 trillion per year by 2032—while saving lives.
Commonwealth observed Thursday that while affordability "is a pervasive problem" in the U.S., Australia "offers free care in all public hospitals, and the nation's universal Medicare system provides all Australians with coverage for all or part of the cost of [general practitioners] and specialist consultations and diagnostic tests, with additional subsidies available for private hospital care."
"The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its healthcare sector," the report continues. "While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents' most basic health care needs, including universal coverage."
With the U.S. presidential election less than two months away, neither 2024 candidate for the two major parties has outlined a detailed healthcare proposal thus far.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, said during last week's debate in Philadelphia that he merely has "the concepts of a plan," while Harris—who once co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation in the Senate—said she "absolutely" supports "private healthcare options" and wants to "maintain and grow the Affordable Care Act."
Just days after the debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—Trump's running mate—said the Republican nominee prefers a system in which "a young American" and a "65-year-old American with a chronic condition" are not placed in "the same risk pools," suggesting a rollback of the ACA's protections for people with preexisting conditions.
"You can't really say people with preexisting conditions are protected if they are in a separate insurance risk pool and can be charged exorbitant premiums,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the research group KFF, wrote in response to Vance's comments.
"The Fed must continue to cut rates aggressively in the coming months to prevent a slowing labor market and provide much-needed relief to people who are bearing the brunt of high interest rates," said one economist.
Economists and working-class people across the United States on Wednesday welcomed the Federal Reserve's decision to cut its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point as an incredibly overdue and necessary move.
In line with signals from Fed Chair Jerome Powell's speech last month, the Federal Open Market Committee lowered the federal funds rate by half a percentage point to 4.74-5%, the first cut "since March 2020 when Covid-19 was hammering the economy," as The Associated Press noted. Additional cuts are expected over the next two years.
"Finally," wrote Kenny Stancil, a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project and former Common Dreams staff writer, in a blog post. "The Fed should have provided interest rate relief months ago. While this overdue move is welcome, we must reiterate that Powell's deferral of interest rate cuts has hurt the clean energy transition and inflicted other economic harms."
Lawmakers and experts, including Groundwork Collaborative chief economist Rakeen Mabud, have long called for rate cuts and highlighted the harms of refusing to pursue them.
"Today's rate cut is a step in the right direction, but only a first step," said Mabud in a statement Wednesday. "The Fed must continue to cut rates aggressively in the coming months to prevent a slowing labor market and provide much-needed relief to people who are bearing the brunt of high interest rates."
Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker also welcomed that the Fed is changing course, saying: "This is a belated recognition that the battle against inflation has been won. Contrary to the predictions of almost all economists, including those at the Fed, this victory was won without a major uptick in unemployment."
"Unfortunately, the Fed waited too long to make this turn," Baker continued. "As a result, the unemployment rate has drifted higher. While there is little basis for concerns about a recession, if the unemployment rate is 0.5 percentage points higher than it needs to be, that translates into 800,000 people out of work who want jobs."
"It is good that the Fed has now recognized the weakening of the labor market and responded with an aggressive cut," he added. "Given there is almost no risk of rekindling inflation, the greater boost to the labor market is largely costless. Also, it will help to spur the housing market where millions of people have put off selling homes because of high mortgage rates."
Liz Zelnick of Accountable.US similarly stressed the benefits, saying that "while it should have come sooner, the Fed's interest rate cut will ease some burden for many Americans that found it simply too expensive to buy new homes or cars."
"Fortunately, the Fed's aggressive interest rate strategy defied odds and did not spur a recession as the economy continues to grow hundreds of thousands of jobs every month while wages are rising," she said. "Persistently high interest rates were never going to get at the root of the corporate price gouging epidemic that has needlessly kept prices high on many necessities—a problem that is on Congress to fix."
Some members of Congress who have been pushing for rate cuts also applauded the belated action—including Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), chair of the Joint Economic Committee.
"Let's be clear: Today's decision is a big win for families across the country," he declared. "Lower rates mean that more families will be able to buy a home or a car without high interest payments looming over them, and their credit card bills will go down."
"But there is still work to be done," he said. "I will continue to work with my colleagues to fight for policies that raise wages, strengthen our economy, create new jobs, and lower prices for families in New Mexico and across the country."
Congressman Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), ranking member of the House Budget Committee, has also criticized the central bank's refusal to cut rates and praised the Wednesday reversal.
"We've made significant progress on inflation, but House Democrats know there is more to be done to bring down the cost of everyday goods and take on corporate price gouging," Boyle said, nodding to the November election in which former Republican President Donald Trump is facing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
"While House Republicans continue trying to inflict higher costs and higher taxes on the middle class with Trump's Project 2025 agenda," he added, "House Democrats will never stop fighting to deliver an economy that works for working families."
Harris similarly applauded the "welcome news for Americans who have borne the brunt of high prices" while acknowledging that more must be done and vowing that "my focus is on the work ahead to keep bringing prices down."
"I know prices are still too high for many middle-class and working families, and my top priority as president will be to lower the costs of everyday needs like healthcare, housing, and groceries. That is why I am proposing plans to cut taxes for more than 100 million working and middle-class Americans, pass the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries, and make housing more affordable by building 3 million new homes and giving more Americans down payment assistance," she said.
The Democrat also took aim at Trump's intentions, warning that "while proposing more tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations, his plan would increase costs on families by nearly $4,000 a year by slapping a Trump Tax on goods families rely on, like gas, food, and clothing. He wants to repeal the law I cast the tie-breaking vote to pass that caps the costs of prescription drugs for seniors, including insulin at $35. He would end the Affordable Care Act and erase the progress we have made to lower premiums for millions of Americans by hundreds of dollars a year."
"Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists say his plan would increase inflation, and a Moody's report found it would cause a recession by the middle of next year," she noted. "This election is about whether we are going to finally build an opportunity economy that gives every American a shot not just to get by, but to get ahead. As president, that will be my priority every day."