By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
You may think public utilities only overcharge you or destroy trees while “trimming” to clear their haphazard boondoggle wiring. Every disaster, every storm, every hiccup and hundreds of thousands huddle powerless, meaning without electricity of course, while the utility company scamsters move to an even bigger trough.
Note that Trump is totally silent on utility company ripoffs. There are reasons for this. My recent tale of woe:
A couple of months ago, I had Consumers Energy pickup a good but older refrigerator at my golf course condo. This is an “extra” property I bought from one of my friends when he went financially “belly up” so that his ex and their son could live there until he got out of high school. I am now stuck with it. Make me an offer.
Anyway, the deal was that I get $50 for a good, clean and totally usable refrigerator as a rebate toward replacing it with a newer low energy model. Instead I got a check that, in microscopic print, if I make the mistake of cashing it, signs me up for over $500 a year in a scam appliance repair guarantee deal.
The appliances there are all new, all under warranty for years and covered by other programs. This is a total scam. No mention of this was made when the refrigerator was picked up. The $50 bucks won’t break me as, according to the FBI, I am already well paid by Russian intelligence to undermine American freedoms.
Oh, that’s another ripoff it seems, their money never shows up either. Perhaps if I worked at the White House I might get paid through their slush funds. They did ask at one time.
Anyway, some background on Consumers Energy, the company involved. I did some time in politics, locally and nationally, and even ducked offers to rig an election and put me in congress, but I digress.
Background
They used to be Consumers Power. I remember the company well when I was an advisor to then Michigan Governor John Engler. I had worked on legislation to regulate their price gouging, which had angered voters.
What I didn’t know is that GOP staffers were using this bill to get an under the counter payoff from Consumers Power to kill the bill. I remember when the then Republican Party Chairman showed up with a $55k check in his pocket, which he said would buy a key senate election.
As usual, politics is a cash game and winning elections comes before public duty. It is always that “some day” in the unimaginable future when good will be done and corporate cash, expressed in this case as an illegal payoff (now legal due to Citizens United v. FEC) screwed Michigan. How many have died because of bills killed and regulators paid off?
Many.
You see, Consumers Power, now Consumers Energy, had built a Chernobyl type reactor in Midland Michigan and their customers were being bled to death funding its closure.
“The water pumps at Dow (Chemical) were submerged (during the flood), and all their waste went down the Tittabawassee River,” she said. “If the nuclear plant had been operating, their pumps would have been submerged, which would have meant a loss of water for the nuclear plant and a possible meltdown.
“I always thought, ‘Thank God I stopped it.’ That (a meltdown) would have been a real tragedy for the Saginaw Valley and Great Lakes.”
Some of the parts were sent to Davis Besse outside Toledo:
Following the February shutdown for refueling outage and inspection at the Davis-Besse nuclear power station, 21 miles Southeast of Toledo, Ohio, operators discovered a cavity had eaten through 6-inches of carbon steel on the top of the 6½-inch thick reactor pressure vessel, the apparent result of corrosive coolant leakage from the reactor core. Less than a half inch of the reactor vessel’s stainless steel liner remained in the bottom of the 4″X5″X6″ cavity separating the reactor’s highly radioactive and pressurized internal environment (2500psi) from blasting into the reactor containment building damaging safety equipment and possibly setting into motion a core melt accident. Initial company inspections additionally found cracks in the welds on five of the 69 nickel alloy sleeves that penetrate the reactor pressure vessel head to allow for control rod insertion to safely shutdown the reactor.
“First Energy pushed this reactor beyond all reasonable safety margins and the NRC basically allowed it,” said Paul Gunter, Director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for Washington, DC-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “This was a dangerous nuclear experiment on public safety that came damn close to exceeding the strength of a fundamental piece of reactor safety equipment, the reactor pressure vessel,” he said.
The partner here was Dow Chemical. As a Vietnam Veteran, it was Dow that made most of the Agent Orange that killed up to 1 million men that served in Vietnam. Dow is responsible for my Type 2 Diabetes, an Agent Orange side effect and the degenerative joint disease that keeps me in physical therapy and meds.
Read about DOW here:
https://www.corp-research.org/dowchemical
It isn’t just about ripping off disabled vets or how state government allows these thugs to victimize the public while waiting some day to kill us all off through radiation leaks, acid rain, power outages and their endless consumer scams.
This $50 cost me waiting two weeks for a crew to show up, taking a day off to meet them and then, because of an alert bank teller, escaping the $1500 they might have stolen from me.
As long as the GOP keeps getting those checks and corporate scamster Rick Snyder serves as governor, this will go on and on.
Do make sure Consumers Energy finds this article. They can talk to me about it. It will cost them much more than the $50 dollars and the cheap refrigerator they stole.
Then again, how many veterans, how many working poor, and “working poor” is the real definition for 80% of Michigan residents, have then ripped off?
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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Gordon proves once again that he is the smartest one in the room.Gordon Duff for President! Carol Duff would be an outstanding First Lady! We need some brains in the WH.
At the close of our conversation, he leaned over to me and said, “Listen, there have been a lot of guys before you two who’ve tried to interfere with the AEC program. We got them and we’ll get you.”
The system on VT would not post a statement by former Representative Chet Hollifield, California who made the above threat to Professor John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D. decades ago.
https://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/JWGcv.html
John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D.
Birth: September 21, 1918 in Cleveland, Ohio., Died 2007
Education:
• Grade and high school in Cleveland. A.B. in Chemistry from Oberlin College, 1939.
• Ph.D. in Nuclear/Physical Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, 1943. Dissertation: Discovery of Pa-232, U-232, Pa-233, and U-233. Proof of the slow and fast neutron fissionability of U-233. Discovery of the 4n + 1 radioactive series.
• M.D. from the School of Medicine, University of California at San Francisco, 1946. Internship in internal medicine at the University of California Hospital, San Francisco, 1946-1947.
• Gofman produced the first plutonium for the Atomic Bomb. After that he spent his life on both cancer and heart disease problems for human health. He was the world authority on radiation and public health.
• I urge everyone to read the Plowboy Interview at the link below, which describes what happened to him and Dr. Arthur Tamplin when they blew the whistle on the plans of the AEC and Congress to build 1000 nuclear power plants and make many nuclear explosions to release natural gas. He went up against his own advisor Glenn T. Seaborg, Nobel Laureate and Chairman of the AEC. He placed the public interest first and paid the price. This was a top chemist and physicist and medical doctor with a conscience. He won many awards and should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This is how our corrupt …
This is how our corrupt government treats real scientists who place the public interest above selfish interests. This was a shameful disgraceful episode in American History but ultimately the public did win at least for a time.
Quote from the Plowboy interview with Professor Dr John W. Gofman at this link:
https://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/PlowboyIntrv.html
“PLOWBOY: You dropped your heart research project?
GOFMAN: I let myself get talked out of it. John Foster, the director of the Atomic Energy Commission’s weapons design facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, called me up. He wanted me to set up a biomedical division at Livermore that would investigate the overall impact of radiation upon man in the biosphere.
I finally told him I’d accept the job . . . but on one condition: I wanted letters from the president and regents of the University of California saying that anytime I wanted to resume full-time teaching at Berkeley, I could do so. I needed that assurance because I didn’t really trust the AEC. Johnny went right to the officials and got the letters for me, and that’s how I started studying radiation and human health for the Atomic Energy Commission.
We didn’t accomplish anything earthshaking in our division, but we were all doing good scientific work . . . and I felt I was making some significant advances in the area of which specific chromosome abnormalities can cause cancer.
PLOWBOY: When did you realize the harmful effects..
PLOWBOY: When did you realize the harmful effects of low-level radiation?
GOFMAN: Well, back in October of 1969 I was slated to give a talk at the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers. It so happened that Tamplin and I had just completed our cancer and radiation calculations, so I used the results as the topic for my speech. I described the three generalizations we had learned about radiation and health: that all forms of human cancer can be induced by radiation . . . that, per unit of radiation, there’s a certain linear percentage increase in the production of cancer . . . and that children are far more susceptible to radiation-induced cancer than are older people. I also explained that our data showed the cancer hazard resulting from radiation to be 20 times worse than we, or anybody, had thought: We calculated that, if everyone in the country received the official “permissible” dose of radiation–which at the time was 170 millirems per year–there would be between 16,000 and 32,000 additional cancer deaths a year in our nation.
With that speech, the AEC’s façade–the claim that it really wanted to know the truth about radiation–began to crumble. Actually, I didn’t get much publicity from the Institute lecture, but about three weeks later I was invited to testify at Edmund Muskie’s Senate hearings on underground uses of nuclear energy. Art and I went up to Washington, and I gave an expanded version of my earlier speech, entitled
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