Department of Energy Hands Over Billions of Dollars to ‘Poster Child for Cost Overruns’

Nuclear Power Industry is Perfect Illustration of Why Taxpayers Are Saying “No More Bailouts!” – Billions for Plant Vogtle Reactors Impossible to Justify in Terms of Rising Financial Risks, Reduced Demand for Power, Cheaper Renewables and Huge Potential of Energy Efficiency

ATLANTA, Dec. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — First it was insurance companies, then it was banks and that was followed by auto companies. Now, the federal government is putting U.S. taxpayers and utility customers at new risk under a controversial U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) loan guarantee program that is slated to award $18.5 billion, with Atlanta-based Southern Company predicted to be first on the list for program funds to build two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro, Georgia.

Ironically, the DOE’s “top choice” for the nuclear reactor loan guarantees, which are backed by U.S. taxpayers in the event of defaults, is the very same Plant Vogtle that helped to kill the previous nuclear power boom in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Huge cost overruns at the original Plant Vogtle – which escalated from $660 million for four reactors to a whopping $8.87 billion for two – likely played a role in putting the brakes on nuclear expansion plans pursued decades ago in the United States.

Will history repeat itself on Plant Vogtle cost overruns?

Higher bills and costly delays may already be in the works at Plant Vogtle. According to news accounts in early December 2009: “The proposed construction of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro could likely have cost overruns and possibly face delays, according to testimony released by the Georgia Public Service Commission. The group monitoring the progress of the new reactors is also being denied access to crucial information about the process, and Georgia Power is not revising economic evaluations based on a variety of factors that include a reduced demand for electricity and cheaper alternatives to nuclear energy, the document says.”

Such developments for the proposed new Plant Vogtle reactors could parallel the current fiasco in San Antonio, Texas, where another would-be DOE loan guarantee is facing local rejection of a new reactor project that is plagued with a $5 billion cost overrun that amounts to 27 percent of the initially projected budget.

Dr. Stephen A. Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, points out: “Nuclear power is most certainly not the best path to clean and low-cost energy for the United States. Instead, the first step should be reducing our energy consumption in this country and efficiently using the energy that we do consume, not spending hundreds of billions of Americans’ hard-earned dollars on risky new nuclear reactors that will pad the pockets of the nuclear industry even more. Utilities are doing everything they can to shift all of the risks onto ratepayers and U.S. taxpayers. Why? Because the utilities can’t afford to do it any other way. The proponents for new nuclear reactors are essentially proponents for more taxpayer-funded bailouts for irresponsible corporations that continue to make bad energy decisions.”

Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, says: “2010 will be the seventh year of the so-called ‘Nuclear Renaissance,’ but it is shaping up to be a lot like the U.S. nuclear industry of the 1980s, a decade of no new orders, multiple delays and cancellations, hefty defaults, and emerging cheaper alternatives. Of 26 new nuclear reactor license applications submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 2007, 19 have been cancelled or delayed and every private sector project has suffered a downgrade by credit rating agencies. The reality is that capital markets will not finance new reactors because demand growth has slowed, reactors cost much more than available alternatives and they face too many technology, marketplace, and policy risks; so nuclear advocates have demanded a massive increase in direct federal subsidies to bail the industry out… Full article

Remember that old song, “Looking for Love in all the wrong places?”

That song kind of reminds me of what’s going on in D.C. these days.   No, I am not talking about the latest round of adultery.  I mean the latest “bi-partisan” effort to control the public debt.  Debt is not inherently bad.  It can, in fact, be sound fiscal policy.  When the economy is slow, the government can run up some debt by pumping money into the economy by deficit spending.  The problem here is that GW ran up too much debt in fighting his “War on Terror.”  Because of needless spending on a needless war in Iraq, he spent this country into a hole we may never climb out of.  At the same time he also broke the other economic tool the government has to tweak the economy—the interest rate.

Generally, when the economy is slow, the government can reduce the interest rate to encourage investment to create jobs.  It is hard to do that when the interest rate is at 0% already.  This is the mess that Obama inherited when he took office.  After eight years of shoveling $$$ to their friends at Blackwater, Haliburton, KBR and the like, the Republicans have all of a sudden developed a conscience and are screaming for fiscal responsibility.

It is too late folks.  They should have started screaming years ago.  The problems we are having today, slow economy and job loss, are EXACTLY what deficit spending is for.  If we are ever going to emerge from the mess we are in, that is exactly what we must do—OVER SPEND.  But, we must overspend on us!  There is only one place that we can afford to cut spending and that is on defense.  Over 60% of our budget goes to military spending.  That is a luxury we can no longer afford.  That “great life” we are paying to protect is disappearing.  We need to reset the economy and we need to do it now.

We need to break health care’s connection with the workplace.  We need to put the public option in place.  We need to rescind the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy.  We need to stop all the foreclosures and let Sheila Bair at the FDIC straighten that mess out.  The banks need to start being banks again and the credit card industry needs to be seriously shaken up NOW, not a year from now.  Consumers need an economic bill of rights that will stop the egregious usury that the banks are currently committing.  We need a real public works program and we need to shift the majority of our wealth away from defense spending.  The nation’s largest, non-governmental employer is Wal-Mart.  That has to stop.  They are a service industry.  They do not make anything. They simply move things around.  We need to put people to work building/creating stuff again.  By stuff, I do not mean little lady’s hand bags made out of horse hair that cost $4,000, like I saw advertised in the N Y Times the other day.  I mean real things that people can use.  Anyone who is making enough to throw $4,000 away on a purse is making way too much money and the tax structure needs to redistribute it.  Little kids in Oregon can only afford to go to school four days a week while Stephanie Seymour is awarded $9,000 a day for alimony and child support.  That’s just wrong.

The solution does not lie in a bi-partisan committee.  Obama’s support is disappearing because he is looking for love in all the wrong places.  He is seeking support from people who never voted for him and will never support him.  He needs to remember who did support him and start looking there.  That’s what I’m talking about.

Forget about those lucrative investments in foreign oil! It’s Time for the Next Big Thing! Purchase influence in the newest, Made-in-USA Bubble, the Election Market! Yes, friends! Become a shot-caller and make millions! We guarantee the vote will go your way – every time! Log onto Dollars for Democracy.Com, “We bring good things to Life!”

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Oakland teachers have had to face the hard lessons of Privatization earlier than most. The state took over the public schools in 2003 and then turned the school system into a virtual laboratory for the corporate concept of schools: opening charters left and right, closing schools, laying off librarians and custodians, trashing the quality of public education, and testing, testing, testing.

Our experience is that privatization proceeds in pieces, the first step includes turning over public functions to “the market” through corporatizing every policy and procedure. The United States – the first country to establish free, universal public education – is on now track to being the first country to eliminate it. After seven years, far more cities than Oakland are living out what this means.

The final step is the disenfranchisement of the public in all forms and the extermination of public rights, public lands, public parks, public control, public concerns, public spaces, the public commons, the welfare of the public, public issues and… public power.

This is the formal Dispossession of the Public and the elimination of its role in human affairs. Privatization and dispossession are two sides of the same coin. Naomi Klein describes how this began with the federal government, under George Bush II, in her great book The Shock Doctrine. New Orleans showed us what this means in practice.

So, on January 21, 2010, dispossession just took a giant step forward with the Supreme Court decision that reversed a century of controls restraining corporate influence in the electoral process. Now corporations can spend unlimited amounts in any election, right up to election day. We can now state with certainty that it will be corporations, not Democrats or Republicans, who will win out in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Implications

1)  This was an open and aggressive usurpation of power. The Supreme Court chose to re-open a case they had already decided upon and twisted it in an entirely new direction. This will be a polarizing issue in the months ahead. It may also be the biggest Constitutional Crisis since Watergate in 1973-74. After all one branch of the government – the Supreme Court – openly attacked another – the Congress – by drastically changing the rules. State laws restricting corporations are now on the road to oblivion.

2) Corporations can attack or support any candidate they choose. If Standard Oil used just 5% of their legally-reported profits to spend in elections, they would spend more than all candidates spent, at every level, in the 2008 elections – the costliest election in history. The entire electoral process is now under corporate control. The ratio of corporate political spending to corporate profits is so small that it is just chump change to corporations.

3) Corporations can buy up all commercial time and totally censor a candidate out of the media. They can also use this time to push their agenda, their way of framing the issues, and – as we have learned from our experience with Fox News – completely lie to the audience, 24 hours a day. When the most powerful institutions in world history seize the electoral process, it is beginning to smell like class warfare.

4)  The decision opens the doors to the open purchase and selling of laws as commodities. Of course, we know that corporate influence is already paramount, in every state capitol as well as Washington DC. But now laws will be openly written, endorsed and sponsored by corporations, to be handled by the Congressman from Wall Mart, Standard Oil, or perhaps billionaire, Eli Broad’s, Aspire Charter Schools Corporation. This decision turns elections into an ATM for Wall Street.

5)  In essence, the decision opens the doors to the privatization of the basic right to have free elections. This came from the same court that decided George Bush II won the Florida election, thus getting the Electoral College Votes to win the 2000 election. They refused to permit recounting the ballots, in the face of massive open public fraud, when most people expected that a re-count would show that Gore had won the election.

Conclusion: The right of the Public to control the electoral process is now eradicated. The presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were openly stolen. But it’s just too expensive gearing up for this every time! So now elections are now simply subordinated to the Market. Everything is now for sale. Democracy is now being privatized.

We have only to look at Haiti to see where this is going. Haiti was and is the best and most elaborated example of Corpworld – a completely privatized society, government abdicating all responsibility to the people, no public schools, death squads funded by the richest men in the country. The government could not even provide water, yet water was available after the quake – for a price.

Dred Scott Decision

6)  The last time such an attack on the public was made was in the run-up to the Civil War. In the 1850s, the South had strategically seized control of all three Branches of Government – the Presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court. Property in Slaves began an aggressive assault of property in slaves against the Property of the Public.

The 1857 Dred Scott decision was the last step. A Southern slave owner had sued to recover his property, Dred Scott, who had escaped to the North. The court held that property in slaves trumps democracy and that by asserting that all Government had the duty to protect slave property – even in the North and the Territories. Following from the right of private property to exist, it is an unfair limitation to restrict private property’s right to own human beings!

The Corporate Election Spending decision is a similar attack. Today corporate private property demands and now receives greater rights over public property in free and democratic elections. Like 1850s, corporate private property now has complete dominion over the three Branches of Government. Now they are turning to the attack.

Historically property wars such as these have always been the indicator of massive societal turmoil, war and destruction that can last for decades until one form of property predominates. Then they usually abolish the other form of property, as the American Revolution abolished the Property of Royalty and the Civil War abolished property in human slaves, and a new society is born. This occurs when uman beings consciously establish new ways to relate together.

What Is Corporate Property?

Americans are exposed to the ubiquitous corporate influence 24 and 7. But most people have only a hazy understanding of what a corporation really is.

There is no mention of corporations in the US Constitution, nor in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Rights and protections are assigned to the press, religions, militias and the people – but not corporations. In fact, the Revolution that was supposedly against English King George, was also against corporations, for each territory was ruled by a corporation – the Massachusetts Corporation, the Virginia Corporation, etc. In those days, corporations had their own militias, armed bodies of men to enforce their wills.

Corporations were first empowered by the state to raise money for public works – digging the Erie Canal for example. There were fewer than 20 corporations in existence before the Revolution of 1776. Their numbers exploded after 1800. Every corporation is still licensed by the state to exist. This, of course, means that the state can abolish them, just as wealth in human slaves was abolished after the Civil War. If we can put people to death for criminal activity, why can’t we execute corporations for criminal activities?

Corporations are artificial legal constructs that allow the people involved with them to avoid personal responsibility for any personal liability against the Public. Furthermore, given that a CEO is responsible to advance the interests of the investors, he/she is prevented, by law, from doing anything that hinders investor ability to maximize profit.

This means that if it is cheaper to produce coal by blowing off mountain tops (a current practice known as “mountain topping”), then a CEO is restrained from doing anything to prevent this. Neither can CEO’s put in those expensive filters that clean the water before they dump it into the rivers. If they did, they could be forcibly replaced, ending all those cool corporate bonuses they were receiving.

This vision of Corporations Ubber Alles was first advanced by Milton Friedman in the ‘50’s. More recently, the ultra-reactionary Grove Norquist, demanded that government be shrunk down to the size that it could be drowned in the bathtub. The open corporate goal is a totally privatized society, in tandem with the absolute dispossession of the public as an entity having any legal standing whatsoever. These ideologues argue that every single thing in society should be controlled by corporations and offered to people at a price.

Quite cooperatively, federal, state and local governments are getting out of the business of providing any people services at all. They are abdicating their responsibility to the public.

Politicians, rich with corporate money, regularly trumpet the line that private corporations can do a better job of handling the business of the public than the public itself can. How does this make any sense at all?

The seizure of public power is now going very far, very fast. Here’s just a couple of examples.

1) For example, in 2006, Diane Feinstein, one of the top three richest Senators, amended the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, originally passed in 1992. A “terrorist” is now legally defined as someone who commits an act of protest that reduces the profits of a corporation, its suppliers or partners. (November 29-December 5 SF Weekly (matthew.smith@sfweekly). Labeling pickets or demonstrators as “terrorists” is now just a mater of a simple judicial proceeding.

Feinstein’s husband, billionaire developer Richard Blum, is perhaps the most powerful of the UC Regents, who just voted to increase fees at the Universities of California by 32%. This step throws the state’s three higher education systems into immediate crisis.

How this powerful Senator and Corporate Executive team works is just one good example of how CEOs move in and out of the government.

From “How the UC Regents Spin Public Funds into Private Profit”

(http://sfbay.spot.us/pitches/337-investors-club-how-the-uc-regents-spin-public-funds-into-private-profit)

“Blum, who is a major force in the state and national Democratic Party, manages private equity investments for a number of publicly-funded universities, generating substantial management fees and business opportunities for himself. He is deeply embedded in a national network of private-sector bankers with interlocking interests in an array of public pension funds and educational institutions and public works projects.

“Historically, Blum has specialized in operating firms that are dependent upon government contracts. It is of note that Blum Capital, a multi-billion private investment firm, has benefited from managing hundreds of millions of dollars in California’s public employee pension fund (CALPERS).”

2) America’s public schools are now more segregated by race than before the Civil Rights Movement. Only two years ago, the Supreme Court cut the legs off Brown v Board of Education by stating that race could not be used to show discrimination “in individual cases”. Now an Arizona court has found that charter schools cannot be sued for discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. Arizona’s charters are heavily segregated.

Crisis

For the first time in generations, America is experiencing how an unresolvable economic crisis begins to be expressed as a political crisis. As this process deepens, the two begin to reinforce each other and threaten to spin out of control. The longer the crises last, the more achingly unresolvable it becomes, the more unstable current events become, */and the more any person, who is not a millionaire, will pay.

Corporate forces understand this and thus are using their political power to change the role of government in America. The state itself is being restructured to facilitate the needs of private property in a new era, and protect it in new ways. Instead of providing for human beings, government steps in to organize what can only be called a for-real class war – from the top-down. Privatization and the dispossession of the public are features of this process.

The economic polarization of our society is already one of the most severe in the world. We are up against the military-industrial complex, the media-industrial complex and the health care-industrial complex, all firmly controlled by corporations. Now the political polarization is beginning. This is a forum for the most important task in our country – adult education. When people understand that corporations, laws and government are simply arrangements and agreements, they will quickly know what to do.

Government now stands between the corporate attack and the rights of people. It must be forced to guarantee every human need by expanding public property in every direction. The rising political crisis demands that we hold government accountable for the welfare of every single person. If the government isn’t constantly improving the welfare of the public, what good is it?

We are going to fight forward to something new. This mess is no longer reformable. It will take convulsive social activity to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision. Yet this is based on a century and more of legal precedents that give corporations all the rights of individuals and then even more rights. How does hallowed corporate right get reversed? Yet the rights and powers of corporate property must be curtailed by the public, or they will curtail the public. That’s going to be a battle for the ages!

The process begun with the Declaration of Independence must be finished

“whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – ed), it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Steven Miller

January 24, 2010