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.

The future of energy generation in Ohio hangs in the balance with House Bill 6(HB6) and May 22 and 23 saw some pivotal events in the saga of this bill. Protests and hearings laid out two very different paths Ohio could go down, one filled with nuclear contamination and countless tons of waste, the other with clean energy from wind and solar. The proposed law would add a charge to every Ohioan's electric bill in order to bail out the Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear plants. These crumbling, leaking plants can no longer compete in terms of price with wind, solar, or gas generation. Initially, the bill tried to pass itself off as a pro-environmental bill. The official title states that it  was intended "to create the Ohio Clean Air Program, to facilitate and encourage electricity production and use from clean air resources..." and never actually mentioned nuclear power. However, it quickly became clear that restrictions on how generation sources could access money from the charges meant that most of the money would go to First Energy to bail out their failing nuclear plants. Wind farms and solar fields would not be eligible.

White men rule!

That’s the uber-message quietly emerging from the new anti-abortion laws recently passed in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Missouri, no matter that the public remains predominantly supportive of safe, legal abortions.

That doesn’t matter, see. The fact that the Republican Party controls the legislatures in so many states where it lacks majority status, not to mention is able to put presidents in office who fail to win the popular vote, indicates that we live in a rather limited-definition democracy: rule by the most determined cheaters. Or as some would put it, rule by divine decree.

As Ari Berman pointed out recently in Mother Jones, this divine decree is achieved primarily by voter suppression and gerrymandering, as exemplified last year in Georgia’s gubernatorial race.

Albion Winegar Tourgée may be best known now, though not in his lifetime, as the lead attorney in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which was a set-up, a staged incident, with the cooperation even of the railroad company, to get a man arrested for sitting in the wrong car, take the matter to court, and end segregation on trains — except that it backfired horribly and legalized apartheid for over 50 years.

Tourgée’s work was not one incident alone, and his positive influence hasn’t ceased. His was one of the most influential white voices for equal rights for blacks in the decades following the U.S. Civil War. I want to quote and consider a short section found in one of his novels, A Fools Errand. The book was a runaway bestseller in 1879, published anonymously “by one of the fools.”