Ohio's Atomic Lemon Socialism Must Die!

By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News

25 May 19

The following is testimony given before the Ohio Legislature in Columbus, May 22, 2019.

s Ohio’s Legislature declaring a state of atomic socialism?

Is it poised for a Soviet gouging of some $3 billion over the next ten years? If so, this Bolshevik fiscal bloodletting will cripple Ohio’s economy for years to come.

The current bailout scam is meant to save two dirty, dangerous, decayed Chernobyl-ready atomic reactors that are falling apart. Neither can compete in the free markets so many Buckeyes profess to love.

The Legislature proposes this $3-billion handout while blocking the influx of some $4 billion in private capital. That money is waiting to come into the state from a bevy of private investors. These businesses are set to build thousands of wind turbines in ag land along the lake in northern Ohio.

Their proposed wind farm projects would create tens of thousands of jobs while generating massive amounts of safe, clean energy far cheaper than those radioactive “mistakes by the lake.” The fast-rising turbines would lower electric rates throughout the region. Their ripple effect would multiply the private capital and much-needed jobs coming into the state rather than draining it out of the public pocket.

Because of its industrial base, Ohio is already among the nation’s top wind-industry employers. But the components Ohio’s wind industry produces largely go out of state. Almost beyond comprehension, the Legislature is preventing the construction of wind farms within the state that would multiply the demand for the turbine components produced here. And yet it wants to gouge the state’s taxpayers and ratepayers to support two dying nuclear reactors whose crumbling radioactive guts have long since been imported.

The Legislature’s astonishing turn to Soviet atomic economics comes as FirstEnergy’s top executives pocket some $25 million in annual “salaries.” Last year they spent $3 million to “lobby” the Legislature.

So about 10% of the proposed bailout would go straight into the personal bank accounts of the rich execs who have driven FirstEnergy into bankruptcy and now want to profit at public expense to bail it out.

But where is the plan to inspect the crumbling reactors they want us to fund? Are we Ohioans just some saps who buy hot obsolete jalopies without checking the brakes, radiator, tires, or cracked block? How is a bailout to be evaluated without an expert appraisal? What future repairs will these reactors need? What’s their true dollar value?

Davis-Besse is America’s #1 bet to become the next Chernobyl. Designed in the 1960s to last 40 years, it’s now 42 years old. It has hosted two of America’s five worst atomic incidents. It’s likely embrittled and cracked. Its owner loves to defer necessary maintenance. In 2002, boric acid infamously ate into its reactor head. The containment was breached to glue on a new one. The radiation shield building is literally crumbling.

Perry is the first US reactor damaged by an earthquake. Who wants to bet on what happens when the next one hits? Who wants to wait downwind while dizzied operators try to keep that thing under control as it shakes and shimmies, crumbles and collapses?

The NRC always says reactors are “safe,” no matter how close they are to melting down or blowing up. Just ask Greg Jaczko, the Commission’s former Chair, who now says all nuke plants should be shut.

But FE is in bankruptcy, and these are its two prime capital assets. Without inspecting them, how do we know their net present value? What serious investor would fund them without having an independent inspection to determine their actual market price or operational capacities?

Perry and DB spew heat, chemicals, and radiation. Their cooling towers kill birds. Their effluents poison and fry millions of marine creatures. They unbalance and contaminate our Great Lakes.

Sooner or later, decommissioning WILL come. Much of the current workforce MUST be retained for the years of tearing down and burying those radioactive hulks.

The rest can be retrained to build and run wind farms that will last decades. California’s “Retain and Retrain” program at Diablo Canyon’s two soon-to-shut reactors won over the IBEW, and state and environmental groups. Ohio must be next.

But a single infamous setback clause in the Ohio code blocks our wind farm bonanza. Indiana, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania all have similar winds, but far more turbines. Their lesser setbacks cause zero health or ecological damage. Ours block $4 billion in green private investment but demand $3 billion in radioactive bailouts.

The North Coast is flat, windy, laced with transmission lines. The tower sites are near the cities. The farmers want the income. Lake Erie’s midsection hosts the world’s strongest winds, set in fresh, relatively shallow water.

Private atomic socialism-for-the-rich is dooming our state, both economically and ecologically.

Let the markets work. Fully inspect those obsolete radioactive junk heaps before Soviet bailouts stick us with two more Chernobyls. Lift the setback clause. Retain and retrain the workers. Welcome the green on-rush of private capital, secure jobs, cheap energy and modern, zero-emission wind and solar that can make Ohio great again.

True Buckeye capitalists unite! You have only your hot lemon socialism to lose.

Harvey Wasserman, of Bexley, attended the 1975 “Toward Tomorrow Fair” at the University of Massachusetts that first envisioned a totally Solartopian green-powered Earth.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

The American Taliban Meets American Politics

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

25 May 19

emember John Walker Lindh? The media called him the American Taliban (sic; taliban is the plural of talib, which means “student” in both Arabic and Pashto). Lindh was arrested in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 at a fortress being used as a prison called Qalat e-Jangvi. Lindh had been fighting alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when he was caught in the middle of a firefight between the Taliban and US troops. All but 80 of the estimated 500 Taliban fighters were killed.

A CIA officer also was killed. Johnny “Mike” Spann had interviewed Lindh a few hours before he was attacked by Taliban fighters, overwhelmed, and murdered. Mike Spann was a colleague of mine in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. He was the first CIA officer killed in the line of duty after the September 11 attacks. His death was major news, and he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Spann’s death was an easy and obvious good guy/bad guy scenario. Mike Spann had dedicated his life to public service. He had a young wife and a six-month-old child. He had served in the Special Forces. And he had volunteered to go to Afghanistan for the CIA just hours after the attacks.

Lindh, on the other hand, was the proverbial “lost soul.” He was the middle child in a nuclear family, born in Silver Spring, Maryland, and raised in San Anselmo, California. His father was an attorney and his mother a progressive activist. Lindh, though, was restless. He dropped out of high school and earned a GED at the age of 16. That same year, he converted to Islam. At 17 he traveled to Yemen to study Arabic, and at 18, he joined the Taliban.

Many Americans were shocked on November 25, 2001, when Lindh, looking filthy and emaciated, with a long beard, and having been wounded, was arrested by US forces at Qalat e-Jangvi. And most Americans were out for blood. The word “treason” was bandied about in news reports of his arrest, and talking heads on the cable news networks talked about a sentence of life without parole for “aiding the enemy.”

But that’s not what happened. Lindh hadn’t committed treason, a crime which is specifically defined in the Constitution. He hadn’t aided the enemy or supported a terrorist group. The Taliban, after all, was not listed as a terrorist group by the State Department. The United States was not at war with the Taliban. (Indeed, the US has not been legally at war with anybody since December 7, 1941.) Lindh hadn’t borne arms against the United States. He was in Afghanistan fighting the US-allied Northern Alliance.

Lindh was initially charged with ten felonies, which could have resulted in a sentence of life plus 90 years. Instead, the Justice Department, recognizing the weakness of its case, offered him a plea bargain: Plead guilty to “supplying services” to the Taliban and to carrying an explosive in the commission of a felony and all other charges would be dropped. The two sides agreed on a sentence of 20 years in a federal penitentiary. (Lindh would also be prohibited from speaking about his case until 2022, and he would not be allowed access to the internet for the same period. Furthermore, he would not be allowed to email any individual or organization to discuss Islam or any information relative to his case.) He agreed.

That sentence has finally expired. John Walker Lindh was released from prison on May 23, and the outrage was immediate.

Senators Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) wrote to President Trump decrying Lindh’s release and asking why he was released from prison “early,” how many other “terrorists” will be released before 2025, what will be done to reduce terrorist recidivism, and where “released terrorists” will be relocated. They went on to say in their letter – utterly incorrectly – that “Central Intelligence Agency officer Johnny Michael Spann was killed in the Mazar-e Sharif uprising in Afghanistan in November 2001. He was the first American killed in the global war on terrorism. Mr. Lindh, an American who was captured along with Taliban fighters by U.S. forces in November 2001, is believed to have had direct involvement [italics mine] in Spann’s death.”

First, where have Shelby, Hassan, and any other senators been as more than two million Americans were incarcerated in recent years? Where were they when Congress was slashing funds for programs that would have reduced recidivism? Second, are they so clueless as to not understand that when a prisoner serves his time and is released, that’s the end of it? There is no “relocation.” It’s irrelevant whether Lindh is still radicalized or not. And if they’re so opposed to radicalization, then where is the funding for federal de-radicalization programs that have been proposed repeatedly over the past 20 years?

Talk is cheap, and Congress has blown it. If they had really wanted to reduce criminal recidivism, there has been ample opportunity to do so. But they ignore the problem until they can score cheap political points. Mark my words: When people forget in the coming weeks that John Walker Lindh has been released, Shelby and Hassan will lose all interest in the issues raised in their letter. There won’t be any changes to sentencing policy or to the Bureau of Prisons at all. They’ll forget all about it.

As for John Walker Lindh, the man did his time. He paid his debt to society. It’s all over. It’s time for the rest of us to move on.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.