2016 Election, Income Inequality, World Cup

Johnson’s Income Inequality Index

Now that Mitt Romney has decided to take a pass on a third bite at the White House apple it may be US-VOTE-2012-REPUBLICAN CONVENTIONpossible to define Romney’s lasting impact on American politics. While it’s hard to ignore “binders full of women” or the wonderful story of his dog strapped to the top of the family station wagon, I’m betting Romney’s lasting contribution to our political culture will be his historic 47 percent comment.

You may recall Romney’s comments during the 2012 campaign that were caught on tape while he apparently thought he was speaking candidly to a friendly audience.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney said. “All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

The “47 percent” remark in and of itself didn’t doom Romney’s campaign, but added to his otherwise awful overall performance as a candidate the comment did cement the notion that the richy rich former private equity multi-millionaire was out of touch and not only not worrying “about those people,” but not caring much about them either. Left out of Romney’s 47 percent calculation was any consideration of stagnate incomes, the crush of debt that accompanied the home-buying binge or the skyrocketing costs to send a kid to college. Romney seemed to be suggesting that if American’s just worked harder, took more personal responsibility and quit depending on government all would be well. If only it were so easy.

I think we can mark the beginning of the intensifying political focus on income inequality to Mitt and his 47 percent. The fact that candidates in both parties now weave concern about income distribution and the stilted middle class into their stump speeches means the issue has lasting power and may even dominate the next presidential campaign. It’s one issue that appeals to the Tea Party Right and the Elizabeth Warren Left. During Romney’s short-lived flirtation with another run for the White House even the guy with the car elevator felt a need to address income inequality. We’ll hear plenty more in the months ahead.

For some time now I’ve been collecting bits of data and pieces of evidence about this issue in order to attempt to place it in contemporary and historical context. I’ll explore those issues in due course.

For the moment, and as a jumping off point, consider the following, with apologies to Harper’s, The Johnson Income Inequality Index.

Eighty people are as rich as half of the world’s population.

ap110827121143cropA recent report from the global anti-poverty group Oxfam finds that since 2009, the wealth of the 80 richest people in the world “has doubled in nominal terms — while the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population has fallen.” Some of the methodology of the Oxfam report has been criticized, but not the essential thrust – a tiny handful of extraordinarily wealthy people dominate the world’s wealth.

In 81% of America’s counties the median income is lower today than 15 years ago.

In Idaho, for example, the median income in Valley County peaked in 1979. In Power County the peak was 1969. The same can be said for Coos County, Oregon; Whitman County, Washington and Fergus County, Montana.

The really, really, really rich are get much richer.

The New York Times reports that “the jet market is splitting in two. Sales of the largest, most expensive private jets — including private jumbo jets — are soaring, with higher prices and long waiting lists. Smaller, cheaper jets, however, are piling up on the nation’s private-jet tarmacs with big discounts and few buyers.”

If the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of the world is widening, then the really, really, really wealthy are separating from the merely rich. As the Times says, “the super rich are leaving the merely very rich behind. That has created two markets in the upper reaches of the economy: one for the haves and one for the have-mores.”

Not since the Great Depression has wealth inequality been so acute.

A recent academic study shows that in the United States the disparities in wealth – the top 1 percent great-depression-soup-lineenjoying more wealth than the bottom 90 percent – hasn’t been so stark since the Great Depression.

The Guardian says the study shows “The growing indebtedness of most Americans is the main reason behind the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90%.”

CEO’s make 354 times as much as workers.

Most Americans, according to the Harvard Business Review, think the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay is about 30-1 and would be more or less comfortable with that. In fact the ratio is 354-1.

HBR notes the late management guru Peter Drucker’s warning “that any CEO-to-worker ratio larger than 20:1 would ‘increase employee resentment and decrease morale.’ Twenty years ago the ratio had already hit 40 to 1, and it was around 400 to 1 at the time of [Drucker’s] death in 2005. But this new research makes clear that, one, it’s mindbogglingly difficult for ordinary people to even guess at the actual differences between the top and the bottom; and, two, most are in agreement on what that difference should be.”

Middle class wages have been stagnant for 15 years.

As the website run by the data guru Nate Silver says: “One common definition of the American dream is the belief that each generation will do better than the one before. By that measure, the dream is fading. Take the generation born in 1970. In early adulthood, these Americans out earned their parents, those born in 1950. But their gains stalled in the 2000s, when they were in their 30s. Now in their 40s, their earnings have fallen behind those of their parents at the same stage in their lives.”

City dwellers often have no financial cushion.

Nearly half of all households in major cities don’t have enough money saved to cover essential expenses in an emergency, according to a study from the Corporation for Enterprise Development and reported in the Times.

“For many Americans, living without any cushion can lead to financial disaster. This nerve-racking financial insecurity has come to characterize life in cities across the country.”

Born poor, stay poor.

Black children born into poor families tend to remain poor all their lives, according to the Brookings Institution.

“The stain of racism is a stark, depressing reminder of how far short of its founding ideals the nation still falls. Even with the legal scaffolding of American racism dismantled—and even with an African-American in the White House—black children live in the poorest neighborhoods and attend the worst schools; they have the lowest chance of graduating college, and the highest risk of incarceration.

“The race gap is only the most vivid sign that birth is all too often destiny in America. While Americans have always been historically more tolerant of income inequality than their European cousins, this was generally true either because the average standard of living was rising across the board (the “rising tide floats all boats” consolation), or because there was lots of movement up and down the income ladder (the “Horatio Alger” ideal), or both. But the U.S. now faces a threefold threat: stagnant growth in standard of living, a big gap between the rich and the rest, and low rates of upward mobility.”

Rolls Royce is doing fine, thanks.

A Forbes survey last year identified 1,645 billionaires in the world, 219 more billionaires than the year before. Perhaps it is not surprising that the luxury automaker Rolls Royce reported a 33 percent increase in sales in 2014.

2014_rolls_royce_wraith_three_quarters“If you look at the number of ultra-high net worth individuals around the world, that number is clearly growing,” said company spokesman Andrew Ball. “The luxury market is growing at the high end and we are delighted to be part of that.”

Yahoo writes: “The phenomenon helps to explain the strong sales of mega-yachts, rare jewelry and complicated, handmade Swiss watches. There are more people with more money looking for ways to stand out from the crowd — and in this context, a Rolls becomes a very noticeable statement.

“Ball said 70 percent of Rolls buyers are new to the brand, and roughly half choose to customize their cars by adding expensive personal touches. The cost of making a Rolls ‘bespoke’ — the British term for custom-made suits — rather than ‘off the rack’ can dwarf many household budgets.

“It can be simple, like having your initials stitched into the headrest or the veneer,” said Ball. “Customers enjoy this. It’s an emotional process.”

By the way the basic Rolls, without your initials stitched into the headrest, starts at $263,000. There is a waiting list.

Next time: The Political Response to Income Inequality.

Andrus Center, Baseball

Let’s Play Two

Oh the irony. It just ain’t fair.

As the paralyzing cold of January gives way to the anticipation of warm sun and pitchers and catchers reporting in a few weeks, and just as the wise the guys of winter pick next October’s World Series winner – oh the bitter irony, some actually pick the Cubs to win – Ernie dies.ernie-banks

Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub, the greatest Cub in that lousy losing franchise’s pathetic history is gone. I thought he would live forever. If anyone should have Ernie should have.

It would just be like the baseball Gods to finally – after a short interval of 107 years – permit the Cubs to win the World Series this year. We know that it will have to be a matter of divine intervention when it does happen. The Cubs, with more than a century of championship futility blowing in their faces like a stiff wind off Lake Michigan, can’t possibly do it with mere players on the field. A good general manager in a luxury suite won’t get it done. And inept owners like the Ricketts family can’t possibly make it happen. Blame poor Steve Bartman all you want. It’s a sure thing. God will have to intervene for the Cubs to win. I hope she is listening.

Who among us who love the great game would deny that its time for Wrigley to host a World Series? Long-suffering Cub fans deserve to have something to do during the playoffs. “Wait until next year” is the baseball equivalent of “mistakes were made.” It’s old and worn out. But, oh the irony if – OK, when – it happens the greatest Cub of all will have to watch on the ultimate satellite TV hook-up. Mr. Cub is gone.

Ernie Banks died, one must surmise, with a smile on his mug. He was probably thinking about stepping in against Bob Gibson, looking for a fastball and planning to drive it into the ivy. Ernie, it seemed, President-Barack-Obama-awards-Baseball-Hall-of-Famer-Ernie-Banks2never had a bad day. During a long and illustrious career that began in the Negro Leagues he hit 512 of them out of ballparks. He was the best power hitting shortstop to ever play the game. He signed autographs. He charmed crusty writers. That White Sox fan in the White House gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He deserved it.

Ernie really did say on a hot afternoon during another long hot summer at Wrigley that it was such a nice day that they oughtta play two. No one plays doubleheaders anymore. Ernie would have played a twin bill every day and then hung around for extra batting practice and to take a few more ground balls.

Just as the Cubs are looking better Mr. Cub has left for the ultimate spring training.

When he checked in up there – Ernie was always early – he probably showed St. Peter his highly polished spikes, pumped his left hand into the pocket of his glove, offered the old gatekeeper an autograph and asked where he could suit up.

If heaven really exists, it must be like Wrigley on a long, bright summer afternoon. The sky is deep blue. The clouds are fluffy and white. The breeze is cool. The seats are filled with smiling folks and the organ music is loud and just a little off key. Four of five guys dressed in red and white striped shirts and wearing straw boaters are playing ragtime in the concourse under the grandstand. Everything is green and there are no owner’s boxes and no obstructed views. The hot dogs and mustard are plentiful, the peanuts are fresh, the beer is cold and it’s all free in this heaven.

Ernie will trot out to short, shouting encouragement to his teammates. Is that Joe Cronin at second? Gehrig at first? Ernie shouts to the pitcher – today its Lefty Grove – and says, “Groove it, Lefty. This guy’s got nothing.” Honus Wagner steps in and smiles. Musial is on deck, smiling. Everyone is smiling. Even Ty Cobb in center is smiling. Joe Jackson is smiling in left. Ernie knows he didn’t do it. The umps are smiling. Ernie is smiling. Of course, Ernie is always smiling.

If there is a God, Ernie is working on her. “It’s about time,” he’ll says. “Like George Will said, everyone can have a bad century. Don’t you think it’s about time? Wrigley is such a nice place in the fall. Maybe we should play two.”

She’s smiling. It might work. How do you say no to Ernie Banks?  When the Cubs do make it, credit Ernie.

Egan, Energy, Idaho Politics, North Dakota

Study History

“Study history, study history,” Winston Churchill said long ago . “In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.”

I was reminded of those wise words from the 06n25churchill-382089great man recently during the latest dust up concerning the state of Idaho, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and two former Idaho governors.

I’ll leave it to the former governors, Phil Batt and Cecil D. Andrus, to press their case as to why top Idaho officials are mistaken in granting DOE a second “waiver” permitting shipments of commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). My perspective, as Churchill  would suggest, is to remind us of the “history” behind the current and historical controversies. The two former governors share a lot of history with the Department of Energy.

Full disclosure requires that I mention for anyone who doesn’t know that I worked for Cece Andrus years ago, covered both men as a reporter, admire them greatly and consider both among the very best public officials Idaho has ever produced. Rather than a defense of their recent objections I offer some history that helps explain, I think, why Batt and Andrus feel as they do.

Begin at the beginning…

Senator-Harry-S.-TrumanTruman’s initial effort to find out what was going on in great secrecy at Hanford was politely rebuffed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Truman persisted, going so far as to send a committee investigator to the Hanford site. His investigator was turned away. As Truman biographer David McCullough has written in his extraordinary book Truman, the feisty Missourian grew annoyed at the stonewalling and became determined to press hard for answers about what his government was doing. Stimson, now annoyed himself, refused to tell the senator anything while writing in his diary, “Truman is a nuisance and a petty and untrustworthy man. He talks smoothly but acts meanly.” Truman would not learn about the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb until he had been President of the United States for twenty days.

As McCullough writes regarding the development of an atomic weapon, “In less than three years the United States has spent $2 billion, which was not the least of the hidden truths, and, one way or the other, 200,000 people had been involved, only a few having more than a vague idea of what it was about. That the diligent chairman of the Truman Committee had known so little was a clear measure of how extremely effective security had been.” McCullough notes that neither General Douglas MacArthur or Admiral Chester A. Nimitz “or a host of others in high command” knew what was going on.

As I said, the nuclear age was born in secrecy without even the most basic degree of oversight. War time security certainly demanded a high degree of secrecy around the Manhattan Project, but in hindsight it seems impossible to justify that such a massive undertaking with such world-changing consequences should have been conducted completely in the dark. A bomb was born along the Hanford Reach of the Columbia in the 1940’s, but so too was a culture. Remnants of that old culture of secrecy, fueled by a belief that only a handful of highly trained people can know what’s best for the country and that pesky oversight is a “nuisance,” survived long into the Cold War.

For decades as the U.S. nuclear weapons program developed, the arid high desert in eastern Idaho became the home for much of the detritus of wipp01the nuclear age. Much of the weapons production was done at the Rocky Flats DOE site just north of Denver, Colorado. Tools, protective clothing and other materials contaminated during the weapons production process was routinely sent to Idaho for “disposal.” In the early days, the
disposal was something less than “state of the art” with flimsy boxes dumped in ditches scratched out of the desert soil and covered over. Later the material was packed in 55 gallon drums and stacked more safely on pads. The nuclear junk, often referred to as transuranic or TRU waste, piled up in Idaho for years.

Seeking Answers…

When then-Governor Andrus started asking questions in the 1970’s about why any waste was being “stored” in Idaho above the vast Snake River Aquifer he was told that the “storage” was “interim” pending the development of a suitable permanent repository. Andrus exchanged correspondence with the director of what was then called the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a forerunner of the current Dix Lee RayDepartment of Energy. The AEC was run at the time by a pugnacious, opinionated woman named Dixie Lee Ray, a marine biologist by training and an unabashed champion of nuclear energy. Ms. Ray, whose personality and to be truthful physical appearance, resembled a bulldog, later served one contentious term as governor of Washington. Her toxic spats with the Olympia press corps were legendary in those days. She named the pigs she kept at her Fox Island farm after individual Statehouse reporters. You get the idea. Dixie Lee Ray was one of those smart people who knew what was best for the country.

Shortly before Andrus went off to Washington to serve as Secretary of the Interior in Jimmy Carter’s Cabinet, Dixie Lee Ray wrote the governor that the AEC had a plan to dispose of the waste material stored in Idaho and it would be “removed by the end of the decade.” Usually public officials don’t make such certain claims unless they are sure they can follow through, or they are merely dissembling. Andrus assumed the best regarding the assurances from the head of the AEC even though he had crossed swords with federal officials in the early 1970’s when Idaho turned up on a short list of states being considered as national waste disposal sites. Andrus convened a “blue ribbon commission” at the time, which not surprisingly made the case that eastern Idaho – in large part because of the aquifer and active seismic activity – was a horrible place to dispose of waste. Seeds of distrust were deeply planted.

It’s worth a short digression here to note that the historical lack of oversight of DOE and its predecessor agencies has been a completely bi-partisan failing. Democrats and Republicans in Congress and in Idaho, as well as presidents of both parties, largely let the nation’s nuclear policy, including what to do with all the waste material, basically become an issue that was out of sight and therefore out of mind. It has long been an article of faith in Idaho politics that any statewide candidate had to embrace the state’s DOE site and welcome virtually any decision DOE made regarding the facility. Idaho is far from unique in this regard. The same dynamic exists in other states like Washington or South Carolina were a big DOE influence is felt in the economy. To use Tip O’Neill’s famous phrase, the DOE jobs and budgets make all politics local. That is both understandable as politics and regrettable as public policy. It’s far easier, of course, to praise the economics and avoid the oversight. As an historical matter this really only started to change in the 1980’s.

Creating a New Agency…

One of Jimmy Carter’s lasting legacies was to propose and sign into law the legislation creating of the U.S. Department of Energy which took place in August 1977 early in Carter’s administration. As DOE notes on its website, “The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977 created one the most james-schlesinger-dies-665x385interesting and diverse agencies in the Federal government.” The scope of the DOE mission from weapons to waste, from research to reactor safety is about as “diverse” as any in the federal government. Carter made the new expansive agency even more interesting by putting the arrogant, pugnacious empire builder James Schlesinger in charge as the first secretary. It wasn’t one of Carter’s better personnel decisions.

Schlesinger, an economist by training, cut his political teeth in the Nixon Administration as a budget official and for a brief time as director of the Central Intelligence Agency before Nixon moved him to the Department of Defense. When Gerald Ford became president Schlesinger stayed on, but Ford – a better judge of character than Nixon – quickly came to dislike him.

As the Washington Post noted in Schlesinger’s obituary last year: “His aloof, arrogant manner,” as Ford described it, was off putting to the president. “I never could be sure he was leveling with me,” Ford told historian Walter Isaacson, and soon he was gone.

Schlesinger, a Republican, then supported Ronald Reagan against Ford in james-r-schlesinger-1976 and when Reagan lost the nomination Schlesinger switched sides to support Carter and become his energy adviser. On such turns of history are historically bad appointments made. The pipe smoking Schlesinger, a man steeped in the petty intrigues of Washington and the culture of secrecy at the CIA and the Pentagon, was just the man not to take a fledging Department of Energy into a new era of transparency and public accountability.

Andrus, I should note, observed a good deal of the creation of the new agency from a front row seat in the Carter Cabinet. The Interior Department had to assist with the birthing of DOE by transferring personnel and programs, including the northwest’s great legacy of the New Deal the Bonneville Power Administration, to the new Department of Energy.

Fast forward to 1987 and Andrus’ return to the Idaho Statehouse. During his first visit after returning to the  governorship to what was then called the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, Andrus began asking questions, the same kind of questions he had asked in the 1970’s about that old Rocky Flats waste. Recall that he had been promised by Dixie Lee Ray that the TRU waste would be leaving Idaho “by the end of the decade” – the decade of the 1970’s – and now it was a good ten years later. In fact, the waste wasn’t leaving, but was continuing to accumulate due primarily to DOE’s inability to jump the regulatory hurdles required to open a permanent disposal site in New Mexico. The delays in opening the so called WIPP site in New Mexico involved both mismanagement and a lack of national will. DOE couldn’t get on the same page with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the project faltered for years and years.

Andrus went to New Mexico to see for himself and understand the delays. It’s fair to say he came away frustrated and feeling deceived by old promises not kept. Upon returning to Idaho he wrote a famous letter to then Energy Secretary James Watkins, a imperious four-star Navy Admiral accustomed to giving orders but out of his depth when it came to pulling and hauling the vast DOE bureaucracy into action. Andrus informed the admiral’s DOE that he was stopping shipments of Rocky Flats waste pending progress on the New Mexico site and later took similar action to halt shipment to Idaho of spent reactor fuel from the U.S Navy’s nuclear fleet. DOE had the responsibility of permanently disposing of that material, as well. Spent commercial waste from a nuclear power plant in Colorado was next and eventually action in federal court in Idaho.

The Andrus actions were both unprecedented and politically controversial. When Navy spent fuel started piling up at the Bremerton Navy Yard, Democratic Congressman Norm Dicks, a burly former football player who represented the area in Congress, howled and threatened. Virginia Senator John Warner said the governor a tiny western state was impacted national security by causing the undesirable spent fuel to sit in a port in Warner’s home state. Idaho Senator Larry Craig blasted the actions as damaging to INEL and some predicted the demise of the facility.

The national failures of nuclear waste policy rather suddenly became a issue no longer out of sight, but on the pages of the New York Times. The politicians, like Dicks and Warner, who wanted waste out of their states and in remote Idaho had to confront troubling and thorny issues. Those who blasted Andrus for threatening the Idaho facility soon found that sensible approaches to waste management trumped political bombast.

And apparently Idahoans understood what Andrus was doing, as well as what was at stake for Idaho and the nation. He was overwhelming re-elected in 1990. Shortly thereafter he was appointed to head, along with Minnesota Attorney General Skip Humphrey, a joint effort of the nation’s governors and attorneys generals to create a better regulatory scheme for federal facilities, including those operated by DOE and the Defense Department. Congress passed the Federal Facilities Compliance Act in 1992 as a direct result of the Andrus-Humphrey work and thanks to the personal interest of then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.

rocky-flats-2As the Environmental Protection Agency notes on its website the federal facilities law required federal agencies to do something they had not been compelled to do before – observe federal, state and local laws related to hazardous materials. The law also waived federal “sovereign immunity” allowing the government to be taken to court over compliance issues.

 Andrus continued to shadow box DOE throughout his final term as governor, all the while maintaining that the agency born in secrecy and charged with such an expansive mandate could only be compelled to keep commitments through legally binding agreements. He persisted in making the case that Idaho was not a suitable place to store, even temporarily, nuclear materials. Promises, he had learned, were not enough.

Governor Batt, who succeeded Andrus in the Governor’s Office in 1995, took up the cause where his predecessor left off. Through hard work that featured several showdowns with DOE and the brass hats who ran the nuclear navy, Batt fashioned a legally binding settlement agreement with DOE. The agreement specified deadlines for waste disposal and treatment and detailed fines that might be levied on DOE. Like Andrus’ earlier actions the Batt Agreement was controversial and eventually became a ballot issue in 1996. Some thought Batt had given way too much, others thought his demands on DOE would harm the Idaho lab. But the governor had skillfully negotiated a unique deal for Idaho – deadlines and penalties – and once the issues were debated Idaho voters backed their governor and his agreement, which has now been in effect for nearly 20 years.

As the state Department of Environmental Quality notes on its website, when the Batt Agreement was signed: “there were 261 metric tons of heavy metal from spent fuel, 65,000 cubic meters of stored transuranic wastes, another 62,000 cubic meters of buried transuranic waste, approximately 2 million gallons of high-level liquid waste and 3,700 cubic meters of calcined (dried liquid) waste already stored at the INL when Governor Batt took office. Until the Settlement Agreement there was no legally binding commitment to remove any of this waste from Idaho until Governor Batt reached his agreement with federal officials.”

The current Idaho controversy has been sparked by a second “waiver” to this agreement. The waiver allows commercial spent nuclear fuel to come to Idaho for research purposes and, one assumes, storage for some period. The state says the “waiver” will only go into effect when DOE comes up with a new plan to meet milestones spelled out in the Batt Agreement, but, of course, those are milestones the agency has already missed. 

It is only right and fair to acknowledge that the Department of Energy has made great progress over the last decade or so on many waste issues in Idaho and elsewhere in the DOE complex. Thousands of dedicated people are working diligently to deal with environmental problems that literally date back to Harry Truman. Not surprisingly the massive effort is far from completed and remains both complex and extraordinarily expensive. The New Mexico site that had accepted significant amounts of the old Rocky Flats waste, for example, has been forced to indefinitely suspended shipments following an accident involving a breech of a waste drum. The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported last week that the re-opening of the facility is “months behind schedule.” Obviously this impacts some of the material still in Idaho.

Additionally, the national plan to dispose of commercial reactor spent fuel, some of which will likely come again to Idaho under the agreed to yucca_tunnel0901waiver, has been stuck in neutral since the Obama Administration stopped work on the proposed Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada. Republicans in Congress are hoping to put the site back on the table, but for political reasons alone this seems unlikely any time soon.

The current Idaho controversy over waiving provisions of an agreement mandated by a federal court has been easily dismissed by some as simply not a big deal. Considered in isolation it might not be a big deal. But when you study the history and understand that the terms of Phil Batt’s agreement with DOE extend for 20 more years, and that Idaho meanwhile remains host to very significant amounts of material that should be disposed of some place else, the current controversy is more easily seen as part of a storyline that goes back a long, long way. This story will also continue long after many of us are gone.

The nation’s nuclear history is riddled with controversy and certainly a historic lack of planning for waste disposal. The history is also unfortunately wrapped in the legacy of an entire industry born in secrecy, which until relatively recently was unburdened by anything resembling vigorous oversight. It is a simple fact that Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington have been confounded by nuclear waste problems for generations and policy makers remain confounded today.

Churchill was right – in the study of history are all the secrets of statecraft. In the current case, one secret might be to clutch a hard fought and legally binding agreement close to the vest against all efforts to modify it, even a little. Given the long history and the timelines that extend far into the future the integrity of Idaho’s agreement with the Department of Energy will prove to be mighty important over the next 20 years. The state’s decades of experience with the DOE and the waste that hardly anyone believes should be in Idaho also helps explain why the two former governors – a Republican and a Democrat – so adamantly oppose modifications to the 1995 agreement.

DOE Secretaries come and go. Governors do, too. Legal agreements, as long as they are enforced, don’t.