“The end of
democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government
falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.”
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
"Oh, crap, here we go," I thought, as the white SUV cruised down the driveway leading from the Conemaugh Generating Station, a coal-burning facility, on the Indiana County side of the Conemaugh River, northwest of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The driver could only be heading toward me.
A few minutes earlier, after I drove through the small town of New Florence, looking for a clear view of the facility to make photographs, one presented itself, from this road, and I parked on the shoulder of the public road. From that shoulder, I'd made five or six photos (See one here, and yes, that's a wall of coal near the plant, part of the four million tons of this dirty stuff burned each year at the plant).
Coal industry big shots and their partners in crime in the coal-burning electricity-generating industry, must be more paranoid than most folks. The SUV (marked "GenOn Security"), which pulled up behind my car, must have been dispatched from the plant as soon as I'd mounted my camera on the tripod. This particular death factory (the coal-burning facility) is a subsidiary of GenOn Energy Inc.
The security guard, whose name tag identified him as Steven Lambert, might be a retired small-town police officer. He was businesslike and serious, but treated me decently. Something in his manner suggested that this could change quickly if my sarcastic side appeared. Steven stepped out of the vehicle and informed me that he had to photograph both me and my car's licence plate.
"I'm on public property," I reminded him, knowing that being legal, and two dollars, might get me a slice of pizza. He replied that he still had to make those photographs. He also asked me for my driver's license. Steven's supervisors apparently forgot to remind him that we still have our Constitution and Bill of Rights, or what's left of them. Probably few people harbor more hatred than I, for an industry whose power plants kill 25,000 Americans prematurely each year (eight times the number who died on September 11, 2001 at the hands of foreign terrorists), which steals hundreds of billions of dollars of tax money as health and environmental costs and actual subsidies, and which virtually imprisons and/or poisons everyone where coal is mined, processed and burned, and where its lethal residual ash is dangerously and irresponsibly disposed. Nonetheless, I remained grudgingly cooperative, figuring that if I protested too much, I'd soon be confronted by real police, and lose valuable photography time. With just parts of just two days to photograph this, and three other such death factories in the region, and also photograph an important anti-gas-drilling event at an organic farm farther north, down time was no option.
Steven Lambert, who seemed like a decent enough guy, albeit one working for inhuman beings, informed me that among the reasons I was not permitted to photograph the facility is its status as "a government facility."
"BS," I thought. "Is that because the government (via us taxpayers) subsidizes the fossil fuel and nuclear industries which are killing us in return?" Steven Lambert seemed to personify the succinct observation by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon not understanding it.” According to Wikipedia, the Conemaugh facility employs some 200 individuals who also don't understand it, because they are working for the enemy, and because big coal and its allies, are often, by design, the only game in town.
Okay, I get it. Industry paranoia includes the announced fear of being targeted by foreign terrorists, so our home grown terrorists in designer suits get their facility placed on some bogus government list of potential targets. Really, with the abundance of psychopathic corporate CEOs in the U.S., how many foreign terrorists would try to buck the competition? Dick Cheney, that master fear-monger, wants us to believe that if someone takes down a coal-powered generating station, we'll all go back to the Stone Age. Actually, forward thinking groups and individuals have stopped the construction of well over 100 such facilities, and have helped shut down some older ones. Give the lead on that one to the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. Rather than marching backwards, humanity has just a chance of getting it right, if we survive the problems caused by our still-fierce addiction to dirty carbon and nuclear-based energy, and rabid corruption in much of Congress.
As evidence that fossil fuel extraction industries are killing this country, and that their CEOs enjoy special protection above the law, Wikipedia also reports that in March, 2011, PennEnvironment and the Sierra Club won a favorable (to whom, when the penalty is considered, is debatable) court ruling, finding that the plant had committed 8,684 violations of the Clean Water Act by discharging waste directly into the Conemaugh River. On June 6, 2011 GenOn agreed to a $5 million settlement, with $3.75 million going toward the restoration of the river.
If you think that five million dollars is a meaningful fine, simple arithmetic shows that the company was fined a measly $577 per violation of a landmark law instituted to protect the environment and our health. GenOn's 2011 revenue was reported as a bit over $3.6 billion, up over a billion and a third from 2010. In any case, kudos to Penn Environment and Sierra Club for simply getting these criminals into court, and winning this ruling.
In my book, when an industry CEO or director either knowingly or recklessly commits or allows even a few such violations over some length of time, that industry is gone-- faster and farther than a vintage Mickey Mantle home run. That's in a true democratic society, where government serves the people, where businesses pay all their costs of operation, and where the general public gets the information it needs to make responsible choices. In the U.S, where fascism/nazism by corporate control of the government and media exists, many corporate leaders view such fines strictly as costs of doing business, or, to use the vernacular, pay-to-play. The government, be it state or federal, really doesn't want to put these corporations out of business, and their CEOs in prison where they belong (What would happen to you or me if we had poisoned a public waterway over eight thousand times?). Instead, they keep them on as cash cows, to collect meaningless fines, and convince the uninformed that the government is really doing its job of protecting our environment and our health. One hand washes the other, and the collective grime chokes democracy. The fossil fuel industries in particular, exist today only because of generations of political corruption and immense (albeit unknowing) taxpayer assistance. In fact, these industries are models of the use of other people's money, and models of corporate welfare. We don't need the nuclear, coal, natural gas and oil industries any more than we need the cancer, of which their operations cause plenty.
So, in a system in which psychopathic (there's that word again; sorry folks, but it's generally true) CEOs have paid off all three branches of government on the state and often the federal levels, to ensure that their corporate personhoods can pollute as they please, and collect government subsidies, those who fight for human and environmental justice, often at our own expense, are treated as terrorists, when the real terrorists enjoy a free ride. And all this time, I thought that the U.S. refuses to negotiate with terrorists. We risk incarceration and surveillance for doing what's right, while these creeps (and those elected and appointed officials who support them) have gamed the system into practically guaranteeing that they can commit or permit atrocity after atrocity, and never see the inside of a prison. If there's any doubt of who's calling the shots, several years ago, Pennsylvanians learned that the Pa. Department of Homeland Security conducted spying on environmental and peace activists. Obviously, the likes of Charles and David Koch, Aubrey McClendon (recent CEO of Chesapeake Energy, among the most criminal corporation in an industry rife with thugs), and their ilk were paying someone to do their bidding-- at taxpayer expense, of course.
