Randy’s Rants #74
by Randy Cunningham
David Wondolowski, the Godfather of Northeast Ohio building trades, is on a war footing advocating for the approval of data centers in Cleveland. Data centers are the promised land of the building trades. If Wondolowski had his way, Ohio would be a vast landscape of hyper scale data centers bordered by freeways and stadiums. What life for the rest of us would be like in such a dystopia is of no concern to him. He takes care of his own. He is a one trick pony. But he got on my fighting side when he denounced opponents of the data centers as representing “wealthy elitist environmental interests” as reported by Signal Cleveland on June 27th.
He is not only the face of the building trades, but also a cat’s paw for wealthy developers who have rammed one downtown boondoggle after another down the throats of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. These developments have trashed the fiscal health of the city and county and mortgaged the future ability of local government to serve the needs of all our citizens. Meanwhile the richer than God law firms that profit from the bond business that finance the wish lists of developers, and politicians on the make for campaign donations love David.
Now let us talk about “wealthy elitist environmental interests.” We’ve got to straighten out some confusion here. The American environmental movement was supported by some of the wealthiest men in America, whose concern for the future of pristine landscapes was not matched by concern about the working conditions of their employees, or the pollution ravaged communities that made them rich.
There is another narrative that environmentalism is a profoundly democratic achievement of ordinary Americans who have fought a long twilight struggle against those who profit from poisoning us, care nothing about the future of a planet that is teetering on environmental collapse and only value the environment as a scenic background to their multimillion-dollar ranches and estates.
Democratic environmentalism speaks to the wellbeing of expendable people who live in expendable places. They live in places such as Noble Road in East Cleveland where they had to fight for years against an illegal toxic dump. They live throughout Appalachia which has been repeatedly raped by polluters that got rich from coal and are now blowing the tops off mountains in search of the last seams of coal. They are now being poisoned by fracking and toxic injection wells. What they will be left with is what they have always been left with ― poverty, poisoned land and water, and sick people.
Expendable people live in East Palestine, Ohio. One generation of expendable people in Piketon, Ohio are now being succeeded by another generation of expendables with the new hyper-data project being built on the site of the old Portsmouth gaseous diffusion nuclear plant. Expendable people can be found in Boxtown, Tennessee. It is a town originally settled by freed slaves after the Civil War. It is now being poisoned by one of Elon Musk’s hyper-data centers. We are a nation of Boxtowns, East Clevelands, East Palestines, and Piketons.
These expendable people are not rich. They are ordinary people from ordinary America. They rebel against their expendability whatever issue it takes. They demonstrate, they turn city and county council meetings upside down, they get arrested. They do their own research. They organize around kitchen tables. And if they do ask for and receive help from those of a more privileged background, so what? If you are in a bar fight, you don’t ask who has your back, just so long as they keep swinging. The expendables are being mugged and assaulted by the richest men who have ever existed in human history. Men whose phone calls are returned. Men who command battalions of attorneys and media experts who can twist the news and the laws to fit their needs. Men who say “jump!” and the world jumps.
Communities throughout the country, red and blue, urban, suburban and rural, are in open revolt against data centers and the Silicon Valley AI elite, a true elite, not the fictional environmental elite that lives in David’s head. They are filling county and city councils to testify that Sam Altman’s, Elon Musk’s, and Marc Andreessen’s dreams are not their dreams. They are being stonewalled by local governments that have already cut deals with data center developers and denied the public knowledge of the details of these deals with NDAs — nondisclosure agreements.
Those who have failed to repel the data center onslaught, are facing life next to data centers with increased pollution, with nights that are never dark from light pollution, and 24/7 background noise that averages 80 decibels. No more cookouts. No more relaxing nights on the patio. No more quality of life. They cannot sell their properties. Who on earth wants to live next to a data center? Would Wondolowski or any of his union members want to live next to these monstrosities? And with the accumulating experience of living next to data centers, more information is coming forth on just how hazardous it is to live anywhere close to them.
But David does not care. They mean jobs and that is the only thing that counts to him. Once their members are through, they move on to somewhere else and the projects they built live on forever to either wreck the fiscal health of cities and counties, or to force people to live next to a neighbor from hell. We should ask David Wondolowski if he and his union members really want to make common cause with the Lords of Silicon Valley and an industry that is roundly despised by most Americans.
No one should turn their noses up at the need for jobs with decent wages and benefits. Good benefits and good jobs, however, do not justify turning neighborhoods and communities into polluted hell holes. The right to beauty, the right to recreation, the right to not have you and your family poisoned for profit, should be as basic a right for all Americans as decent wages and working conditions. Those rights are being held hostage by rich sociopaths, who care only for themselves. Again, does David really want to be identified with such people? Only he can answer that question.
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Randy’s Rants is a newsletter going out to the left community of Cleveland, featuring the type of essays, commentaries, and opinion pieces that Randy Cunningham has become both noted and infamous for over the years. Randy’s Rants is in honor of the anabaptist sect called the Ranters in the English Civil War, who would chain themselves to the carriages of the nobility, and denounce them by ranting at them; denouncing their greed, depravity, and oppression of the common people. You can find the archive of rants here: https://substack.com/@randysrants