Justice William O. Douglas Compared TVA to Arrogant Soviet-Style Central Planning Bodies

Like our City of St. Augustine, TVA is a criminal polluter and must be investigated, with malefactors prosecuted.

When governments pollute, they must be held to a higher standard than corporations --not a lower one. As I told then-Rep. Al Gore in my July 11, 1983 testimony, pollution by American governments would "make our Founding Fathers sick at heart."

Our faceless, reckless, feckless bureaucrats with our City of St. Augustine put 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir and wanted to bring the crud back to Lincolnville. We caught them. We kept after them (for pert near three years). We stopped them. The state fined them. The crud will soon be removed and sent to a Class I landfill.

Our faceless, reckless, feckless bureaucrats with our City of St. Augustine illegally dumped sewage effluent in saltwater marshes. We found the evidence on county GIS mamps. We reported them and stopped them.

TVA put over 5,400,000 gallons of coal waste in rivers and people's backyards, destroying homes, lives and a subdivision.

The unlined coal waste ponds reckless TVA kept full of poisons near populated areas were mishandled -- let me repeat that -- the ponds were unlined.

Having seen TVA up close and personally since 1977, when I worked on energy issues for Senator James R. Sasser, let me say this and understand it well: TVA is like a Monopolist Gomer and and a Communist Goober running the world's largest electric utility.

Justice William O. Douglas compared TVA to arrogant Soviet-style central planning bodies. I agree. I quoted those words before the TVA Board in Knoxville, even as it celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1983. I covered TVA first as freelance investigative reporter/undergraduate and then as editor of the Appalachian Observer. Seeing TVA's damage to communities and the Appalachian mountains (irresponsible stripmining), I never believed TVA's propaganda -- TVA has betrayed its New Deal roots.

Under Republicans, TVA grew into a monster that virtually created stripmining with its pressures on small businesses.

TVA contributed to the milieum in which coal operators practiced price-fixing. How? By abusing its monopsony power as a large purchaser of coal.

TVA looked the other way at coal quality fraud (layerloading) at the Kingston powerplant.

TVA ignored the walking conflict of interest posed by longtime Senator HOWARD HENRY BAKER, JR., for which the Kington powerplant should be renamed in tribute to his hubris. Baker's family land was being mined and the coal burned at Kingston. But tatterdemalion, tedious TVA lawyers said there was no conflict of interest because Baker owned the land, not the mining companies.

I have been to TVA's Kingston plant during the 1970s when, with a Fund for Investigative Journalism Grant at age 21, U investigated price-fixing and quality fraud by TVA, provided information to the FBI and GAO, helping stop coal quality fraud that cost ratepayers some $300,000,000 from 1951-1981.

At its Kingston plant, TVA never had ASTM-recommended sampling gear, preferring to use a bucket and a shovel to take coal from the middle of layer-loaded coal trucks bearing low-quality coal.

Now TVA is found to have had no plastic liners in its ponds.

Homes are destroyed. Waters are polluted. Land is ruined. Dogs were killed.

We're lucky that people weren't killed, as in the Buffalo Creek Disaster in West Virginia, where a coal waste dam collapsed and killed more than 100 people.

The part-time TVA BOard (consisting of bankers and Republicans) is a perverse model of failure. TVA's effort to ape all things corporate is a perverse model of failure.

TVA's intolerance of employee dissent in the workplace (whistleblowers) could kill.

A federal grand jury must investigate TVA misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance, waste, fraud, abuse and reckless indifference to the value of the beautiful natural environment of Tennessee, where polluters like TVA run riot.

I won my first trial against TVA for terminating the same nuclear whistlblower who won the first nuclear whistleblower case against TVA. Like an elephant, TVA never forgets. Well, neither do I. The same mendacious mediocre management structures that were there 30 years ago are there now -- the Kingston powerplant pollution scandal is living proof.

And someone needs to go to a federal prison for it.