By The River

One of the scarier characters in the long-running Centralia mine fire tragedy in Pennsylvania was J. Steven Griles.

I met Griles on Jan. 5, 1982, in a conference room in the Fulton Bank Building in Harrisburg, Pa., then the headquarters of the former state Department of Environmental Resources. That's him on the right in my photograph above with Robin Ross, then a lawyer for Gov. Dick Thornburgh. Griles was then an official of the U.S. Office of Surface Mining, but his real job was policy hit man for Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who didn't want to spend federal dollars on the Centralia mine fire.

Congress had just appropriated $850,000 for an exploratory drilling project to determine the boundaries of the underground fire in Centralia, which had burned in the labyrinthe of abandoned coal mines beneath the small town since 1962.

It ignited when five firemen hired by the borough council set fire to the town dump on May 27, 1962, as part of a pre-Memorial Day clean-up project (a cemetery was next to the dump). By 1982, after years of underfunded and failed state and federal projects, including the federal backfilling of a state vent pit to settle a hissy fit between two powerful engineers, the fire had moved under residential areas of Centralia and was sending deadly gases into homes. After much pressure, OSM had finally provided enough carbon monoxide monitors for all the homeowners who wanted them. Until then, families had to share. You got it this month, your neighbor the next. Crazy, I know.

Griles was sent to Harrisburg to bully the state into agreeing to take over all future responsibility for dealing with the Centralia mine fire. The meeting on Jan. 5, 1982, was closed to the public, even to members of Centralia Borough Council, but two members of Concerned Citizens, the citizen group in Centralia fighting for help on the mine fire, decided to attend anyway. Tom Larkin and Dave Lamb found the closed door, and after some nervous hesitation, walked inside. I was with them as a reporter, and I followed them in. Griles was livid, his face full of anger

As I wrote in my book, Unseen Danger:

"Everything stopped. The reporter stated his belief that the Federal Open Meeting Act gave the public the right to attend and listen. Steven Griles...said the meeting was to discuss a contract and the working relationship between two governmental bodies and thus did not have to be open...He denied that anyone at the meeting had anything to hide and demanded the intruders leave. No one else at the table spoke, and Griles refused further comment."

We left, although Griles and the state officials conducted a tepid, we're not saying anything press conference when the meeting concluded. Eleven days later, a memorandum written by David Simpson, head of the Wilkes-Barre office of the U.S. Bureau of Mines, which was feuding with its sister agency OSM over Centralia and other issues, said Griles had threatened to take back the gas monitors from Centralia homes unless the state agreed to fund any future Centralia project with its own tax dollars. The memo was leaked to me, and I wrote a story on what it said after confirming with Simpson that he wrote it. Simpson was in the room in Harrisburg.

OSM backed off its threat. The drilling project went forward, and in the fall of 1983, Congress appropriated $42 million to relocate the people of Centralia, it having been deemed too expensive to stop the fire itself.

Fast forward to a day in the spring of 2001. I am in a hearing room in Washington, D.C., for the confirmation hearing of Nora Mead Brownell, a member of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission who had been appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. To my astonishment, also up for confirmation that day, for a job as the number two official in the U.S. Department of the Interior, was J. Steven Griles. After years as a lobbyist for the "extraction industries," he was now going to have the opportunity, courtesy of President George W. Bush, to work his magic all over the country. I recall that Griles, who was wearing an outdoorsy sort of shirt that day, testified lovingly about how he liked to spend time in nature.

Griles got the job, but fell in with bad company, namely über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Griles pleaded guilty in March to lying to the Senate about his relationship with Abramoff. Federal prosecutors said Griles asked Abramoff for $100,000 from his Indian tribal clients for the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which had been organized by Interior Secretary Gale Norton and which was run by Griles' then-girlfriend, Italia Federici.

Yesterday a tearful Griles was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison and a $30,000 fine, double the prison sentence in the plea bargain. Griles had been caught in lies about the extent of his relations with Abramoff even after the plea bargain had been arranged. He isn't cooperating with the continuing investigation of Abramoff, by the way, although Federici is. Griles has since moved on from Federici and is married to Sue Ellen Wooldrige, a former Interior Department lawyer.

Perhaps Griles could serve his sentence at the federal prison off the Route 901 exit of Interstate 81 in Schuylkill County, Pa. It's just a few miles from what's left of Centralia.

J. Steven Griles now. (AP Photo)

Posted by David at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

President Bush's poll numbers could drop into the teens. He could be widely reviled by the mass of the American people. He could even be impeached and removed from office. But even if all this happened, he would still have the last laugh, because he put John Roberts and the ideologue Samuel Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court. They'll be there for the next 20 years, along with Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, acting as a roadblock to every good and decent thing the Congress does, and every attempt by the people to stop bad businesses and bureaucrats from hurting them.

Yesterday, joined by another conservative Republican appointee, Anthony Kennedy, they handed down four 5-4 decisions that, among other things, weaken the separation between church and state and expanded the rights of schools to limit student free speech. They upheld the right of anti-abortion groups and others to run expensive, corporate-funded "issue" ads in the 60 days before an election, and they weakened the Endangered Species Act. Here's another story about it from the Los Angeles Times.

You made this all possible, George W. Bush voters. You may hate him now, but he's doing this for you. Bush lied and dissembled about a lot of things in the 2000 election campaign, but one thing on which he was crystal clear was his plan to appoint Supreme Court justices like Thomas, a self-loathing black who pretends he didn't benefit from affirmative action, and Scalia, like Alito an authoritarian right-wing Catholic. Much, much more is coming. Give yourselves a pat on the back. Bush may be down, but like the Terminator, he is programmed to get up and continue on his mission to destroy everything good and just in American society.

Posted by David at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I see that two well-known figures are thinking of running as third-party candidates for President in 2008. One, Ralph Nader, is both pathetic and dangerous. The other, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, is more in the Ross Perot mold: skilled, wealthy, focused, and a political moderate. And even more dangerous.

Both could do serious damage to the Democratic candidate in 2008, Bloomberg far more than Nader. I don't think the 2008 election will be close enough for Nader to deliver another mortal wound to America like he did in Florida in 2000. As you may recall, in that fateful election he drew enough Democratic votes to cost Gore the state and the election, giving us eight years of George W. Bush, the Iraq War, the Supreme Court appointments, and, like auctioneers in my home state of Michigan used to say in their flyers, "other items too numerous to mention."

Nader, at 73, is a lunatic. One is tempted to call him the Harold Stassen of his day, after the Minnesotan who ran repeatedly for President in the 1950s and 1960s and became a harmless joke. Stassen, at least, didn't do any harm. Nader could have retired 20 years ago with the laurels of liberal history secure upon his head, but instead he couldn't let the attention go. He still argues there was no difference between Gore and Bush in 2000, a delusional belief even in 2000.

Bloomberg, on the other hand, has been highly successful as the founder of Bloomberg News and as Mayor of New York. He is a former Democrat who turned Republican so he could bypass the fractious Democratic primary in the nation's largest city. Many Democrats and even more Republicans would vote for him. He has a personal fortune of around $5 billion and is willing to spend what it takes, just like Perot did. Arguably, Bloomberg would be a good president--as a Democrat.

But this week he left the Republican Party and became an independent. His staff supposedly has been studying the mechanics of an independent bid for the past two years. But both he and his staff are torn over whether he should run as an independent and possibly create the only chance the Republicans have to retain the White House and prolong the Bush misery in surrogate form for four more years. He could draw enough votes to do something similar to what Perot did: destroy the first George Bush's chances for re-election in 1992. Bill Clinton won that election and ushered in 8 great years in the economy.

Bloomberg is 65 and probably knows in his heart that it's this year or never. I hope he resists that temptation for the good of America, or else runs as a Democrat. The nation cannot survive another 4 years of the Bush madness.

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I've written before about how Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has more than its share of really weird, brutal murders. Everyone remembers the slaughter of the Amish school children by Carl Charles Robert IV in West Nickel Mines on Oct. 2, but that was only the latest in a long string of murders in the county.

The latest is the arrest of 16-year-old Alec Devon Kreider of bucolic-sounding Cobblestone Lane, Manheim, for the knife slayings of three people who lived a half-mile from his own home. Supposedly he went there to kill only his friend, Kevin Haines, but doing a Jack-the-Ripper on the parents, Tom and Lisa Haines, as well. A daughter escaped. Kreider supposedly confessed to his father, who then turned him in to the police. Keep in mind that knife slayings--remember Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman?--are often bloody messes, with repeated stab wounds or slashes.

Lancaster County. Call it the land of crazy white people, I suppose. Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" that he got more scared when he encountered a white man on a dark street because statistically, they commit most of the serious crime. I don't think there's another rural/suburban county in Pennsylvania with crimes like this on such a frequent basis.

There really ought to be a psychological investigation of the culture of Lancaster County, where conservative religion dominates life, to figure out what factors lead to these murders. I have an idea about why one 16-year-old boy might be driven to kill another 16-year-old boy, a friend no less, but I'm going to keep it to myself for now and see what comes out as the investigation unfolds.

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One of the most depressing things I read recently was a column in the New York Times (can't link it) by Ben Stein, who basicly said things could get really bad in our future, all because of the continuing gross imbalance in foreign trade between the U.S. and China. Stein may not have been quite that specific about China, but that's what he meant. He predicted the U.S. dollar could fall to one-third the value of a Euro, and that foreign oil producers could then decide to abandon the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. If they picked the Euro, that would mean that our dollars would have to be converted to Euros before they could buy foreign petroleum. It's a bad, bad thing.

What sold in the U.S. isn't made in China these days? Or some other foreign country? Once we made everything, now we make almost nothing. I purchased an Apple laptop last summer, great computer, and it was shipped to me directly from the factory in China. No or very few autos sold here are made in China, but I suspect the days of cheap-China not being in the auto market are numbered. It is simply too cheap to make things in China, and the quality can be as good as U.S.-made. Yes, U.S. consumers benefit in the short term from those cheap China prices, but I suspect U.S. manufacturers who ship jobs to China are the real winners, and don't pass along nearly all the cost savings they achieve.

Yesterday, I took my family to the Holland Aquatics Center, a big indoor pool complex in my home town of Holland, Michigan, where we're spending the week visiting my parents. While warming myself in the hot pool, a man who appeared to be about 44 years-old began telling his economic woes to whomever would listen. Call him the Jeremiah of the hot tub.

He had come to the pool after his shift let out at the furniture factory where he worked, and was clearly mentally handicapped. But his story rang true. He said he had worked for 26 years at an old-line furniture manufacturer in Zeeland and Holland, but had been laid off last year. I asked him why. Because they now make what we made overseas, desks in China and clocks in the Philippines, he said. His new job was a significant pay cut. He didn't say what he made now, but in his old job he made$12.44 per hour. The medical benefits at his new job were bottom-of-the barrel, but cost him $25 for single coverage every two weeks. He had to pay the first $1,000 of doctor visits and that sort of thing himself before the insurance kicked in.

What bothered him most was that he had been laid off four years before qualifying for the desk or clock you received as a gift at 30 years of service. Employee's choice.

Around that time, my wife joined me in the hot tub. He's mentally handiapped, she whispered. She works in the field and knows. We decided to go check on the girls and left. I later saw the same man bending the ear of a woman in the hot tub, telling her of China and clocks and cabinets and the plight of the American working man.

What would it mean for the economy if we announced one day that we weren't going to import anything that we can make or mine here? We'll be happy to export to you, but those are our terms. Would it just mean paying a few dollars more, or would it be worse than that? People may be asking themselves this question in not too much longer.

Posted by David at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm back in my hometown, the Tulip City, the Land of Lawn Care. In other words, Holland, Michigan. We drove out Saturday, our usual route on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Ohio Turnpike, the Indiana Turnpike, and then up into Turnpike-less Michigan.

Gasoline is expensive here, much more so than where I live in Harrisburg, Pa. I paid $2.97 a gallon when I filled up before we left. It was about $3.08 on the Ohio Turnpike and then $2.98 in Michigan. But that last price was an aberration. We lucked out. Most places were charging $3.18 a gallon for regular. My dad said he paid $3.59 a gallon a couple of weeks ago.

The high prices are starting to hit home, and not just in ways you would expect. We stopped for dinner Saturday night at Win Schuler's Restaurant in Marshall, Michigan, and noticed the menu prices for meat entrees had risen significantly since our last stop a year ago. But I will say that the Lake Superior whitefish, which I ordered, was delicious. Never a bad meal at Schuler's.

WKZO TV 3 ran a story on their newscast last night about how the rising price of gas was affecting volunteers, the folks who do everything from deliver Meals on Wheels to ferrying neighbors to the doctor. I suspect we are at the start, perhaps two-tenths of the way along, of a great energy inflation similar to that after the first Arab oil embargo in 1973. Everything is going to cost more. Inflation robs the working man. Even if you reduce your own use of energy--I just bought a more fuel efficient car--you'll pay for the people who don't when you hand over your cash at the grocery store.

Posted by David at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This was one of those miscarriages of justice that are so egregious that you think it can't be happening in 21st century America. But today came good news that a nightmare may be ending for a 40-year-old Connecticut school teacher.

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT, faced 40 years in prison for being convicted of intentionally showing pornographic images to students on a classroom computer. Her life was close to being destroyed, and she isn't out of the woods yet because the judge in the case only ordered a new trial. She did not throw out the case, which would have been the proper response. And Amero and her family likely face crushing legal bills that really should be paid by the school district, the police, and the prosecutor's office that brought this case.

Basicly, Amero was a victim of spyware that took over a classroom computer and sent repeated pornographic pop-up images to the screen. She had no training in what to do if that happened. The school had stopped paying for updates of its web filtering software, and it failed to stop the porn onslaught. At her trial, the defense was blocked by the judge from introducing testimony from a computer forensic expert who examined the hard drive of the Windows computer Amero was using. And the prosecution never ran a spyware scan on the computer.

It's tempting to pass this off as another New England sexual hysteria case, like that infamous Fells Acres daycare prosecution in Massachusetts a few years back when children were induced into giving fanciful testimony about implausible sexual horrors. People went to prison in that case and did serious time before reason was restored, largely because of crusading columns by a Wall Street Journal writer. The real villains here are the Norwich police and prosecutors who seemed to lack any common sense and were willing to let an innocent life be destroyed to win a case that wasn't a case at all.

Judge Hillary Strackbein, in granting a new trial (which probably won't happen, meaning Amero will be in the clear) had the lack of grace to criticize the bloggers around the world who targeted this miscarriage of justice and focused critical attention on Connecticut justice. She accused them of trying to "improperly influence" the court. Too bad, lady.

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