State

During this holiday season nearly 134,000 Ohioans face the prospect of ringing in the new year hungry. Governor John Kasich has decided, despite Ohio’s stagnant job growth and high unemployment, that work requirements will be mandated in 72 counties for childless adults aged 18-50 in order to qualify for food assistance. Ohio is still down 221,000 jobs from where it was in November 2007. Where these 134,000 people will work is a puzzling proposition. What is known is that they will no longer qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – what used to be called food stamps. Kasich could have accepted a federal waiver that would have extended the federal food aid for all the counties in Ohio for at least one year without the work requirements.

On December 2, 2013, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a public meeting on “Waste Confidence” in Perrysburg, OH. The NRC has “confidence” that the high-level radioactive nuclear waste problem will be solved sometime in the future! In 1984, in an Orwellian act, they ruled that they can continue to hand out new licenses for nuclear power reactors and give 20-year license extensions to aging, brittle, accident prone nuclear reactors – without considering public concerns about the safety, storage and disposal of thousands of tons of radioactive waste. The NRC also maintained that high-level radioactive waste is a “generic” issue. So issues specific to particular sites – such as the amount of waste accumulating in overcrowded fuel pools or in aged, deteriorated casks, or in areas prone to flood or earthquake—cannot be raised. A year ago, after legal action by a group of organizations, including the Sierra Club, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC overturned the NRC waste confidence ruling. This forced the NRC to halt all licensing of reactors.

A headline in the Saturday, November 30 Columbus Dispatch screamed: “Family’s well not tainted by driller.” The lead asserts that, “Natural gas that caught fire after it bubbled from a faucet in a Portage County house did not come from a nearby shale well, state officials have concluded.” The question is, can we trust these state officials? The investigation conducted by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) needs to be closely examined. The ODNR is at best a “captured agency” which has been accused repeatedly of promoting the oil and gas industry and specifically fracking, the practice of horizontal drilling. The freepress.org reported earlier this year that formal complaints were filed against ODNR employees for falsifying “production records on wells.” Reports were also made to the FBI that the ODNR was covering up 1200 gas wells that were on record without tax ID numbers in southern Ohio.

Recently Ohio Right to Life brought a bill to the Ohio General Assembly that would change substantially the way adoptions are done in the state. HB 307, known as the Infant Adoption Reform Bill, shortens the time that an adoption in Ohio can be challenged post-finalization, decreases the time a man is eligible to file with the Putative Father Registry, permits individuals and couples to advertise for a child to adopt and increases the Ohio adoption tax credit from $1500 to $10,000. ORTL president Mike Gonidakis claims that these measures will reduce abortion rates and encourage adoption by relieving potential adoptive parents (popularly known in adoption reform as “paps”) from the stress and expense of a long drawn-out, often expensive, adoption process. There is nothing in the bill, however, to indicate how making the adoption process easier and cheaper will increase newborn adoption rates since newborns are traditionally in short supply. Nor does it address how to increase the adoption of hundreds of available children warehoused in the state's over-burdened foster care system.

History has been made in our lifetime. When President Obama came to office in 2009, he had a progressive agenda that included implementing a national high speed rail plan. Many of his platforms became unsuccessful bargaining chips and the high speed rail plan was hardly popular on both sides of the isle. Three Republican governors effectively halted the plan by rescinding astronomical amounts of money that would have improved high speed travel in their respective states. People from Wisconsin, Florida and, of course, Ohio have lost opportunities to move around their states without disrupting the climate on the road or frequently paying more for airfare. Ohio is vying for high-speed rail yet again though. Columbus is situated in a central position relative to cities in Ohio and across state lines. The third largest city in the country, Chicago, is only 350 miles away. While in the air, these cities seem worlds away, and their communities become completely disconnected. And although the road can be exhilarating- and other times exhausting- an identified high speed rail line could get passengers to their destination in only three and a half hours.

This past summer two busloads of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma hit the road to pay a visit to the Ohio Historical Society at its headquarters adjacent to the state fairgrounds. The Oklahoma Shawnee were not on vacation mind you, but on a mission: to give the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) a history lesson. And as one OHS employee recalled in a diplomatic tone, “We’ve learned from our past.” The Oklahoma Shawnee had gotten wind that the Serpent Mound in southern Ohio – the world’s largest effigy mound and recently named by National Geographic as one of “Great Wonders of the Ancient World” – was becoming a popular destination for New Agers. Indeed, over the past three years at certain New Age-themed events the mound was surrounded by hundreds of admirers as their reverence for the mound was clearly on display.

The website says it all: RadioactiveWasteAlert.org.

The billboard with a young woman guzzling liquid with a radioactive warning on it under the phrase: “Don’t Frack My Water, Protect Columbus” set the stage for one of the most important public forums in the city’s history.

If we had to summarize the major themes that emerged from the Tuesday, November 12 Radioactive Frack Waste Forum, the first is this: the public has a right to know that much of the process allowing radioactive waste into the central Ohio watershed near Alum Creek is the result of hidden, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Ohio legislators and Governor John Kasich.

Second: the frack waste is undisputedly radioactive and carcinogenic. Radium 226 found at 3000% over the allowable limit by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a long-established link to many forms of cancer, including breast and bone cancer.

Third: All landfills leak. If you put radioactivity into them, it will come out.