http://truth-out.org/tea-party-senate-candidate-mike-lee-tried-dump-1600-tons-european-nuclear-waste-utah63592Tea Party Senate Candidate Mike Lee Tried
to Dump 1, 600 Tons of European Nuclear
Waste on Utah
Sunday 26 September 2010
by: Andrew Belonsky | AlterNet | Report
Dick Armey and his political organizing group ,
FreedomWorks , have been working overtime to
convince Tea Party supporters they' re invested
in the movement ' s "common sense "
approaches on states' rights , strict
constitutionalism and protecting Main Street
from Wall Street . FreedomWorks ' ties to Big
Energy run deep, however, and by throwing
their weight behind the group ' s endorsed Utah
Senate candidate , Mike Lee, Tea Party
adherents are inadvertently backing a candidate
who tried to bury 1 , 600 tons of European
nuclear waste in what some call their sovereign
state . FreedomWorks and Lee, put simply , are
capitalizing on Tea Party anger for their own
interests .
...
Oil in Their Veins
Energy and oil flow through FreedomWorks '
veins . The political organizing group was born
from a schism within the group Citizens for a
Sound Economy, founded with funding from
conservative oil man David Koch (a principal in
Koch Industries , the second - largest privately
held corporation in the U .S ., and who is now
the big wallet behind another Tea Party- aligned
astroturf group , the Americans for Prosperity
Foundation ). What' s more , FreedomWorks '
chairman and spiritual leader , former House
Speaker Armey spent three years of his post-
Congress career lobbying for Irving Oil , owner
of Canada' s largest oil refinery.
...
FreedomWorks ' connections with the energy
industry don' t end with Armey , of course:
board chair C . Boyden Gray, a card- carrying
member of the Federalist Society , was the Bush
administration ' s Special Envoy for Eurasian
Energy Diplomacy , and now keeps busy with his
eponymous law firm , Gray & Schmitz LLP,
which made $ 20, 000 last year lobbying for
Constellation Energy , a company that operates
nuclear facilities here in the States. And that
brings us back to Lee, whose work with nuclear
waste management company EnergySolutions
squares quite nicely with FreedomWorks '
money- generating mission .
...
In the summer of 2007, Lee took his expertise
to Howrey LLP, an international law firm that
made a total of $5 million lobbying for the
tobacco industry in 2003 and 2004. During his
time at the firm , Lee has worked on behalf of
EnergySolutions , which sued the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission and Utah for the right
to import and store nuclear waste from Italy.
...
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