West Virginia's Response to the Newest Chamical Disaster

The recent MEBS spill on the banks of the Elk River is the third environmental chemical disaster to occur in West Virginia in the last five years.

The first occurred in 2008 at the Bayer CropScience plant in Institute West Virginia. There was an explosion of a chemical waste tank containing chemicals used in fertilizers and pesticides in which two people lost their lives. The investigation went on for the better part of two years and resulted in 2010 of recommendations for better safety rules, set backs from water courses and better oversight of chemical facilities operating in West Virginia. In that same year in Belle West Virginia there was a release of toxic gas from a Dupont chemical plant that resulted in the death of one worker.

Again everyone consulted together. There were meetings after meetings and plans were drafted in the hope this would “never happen again.” These plans were polished and run by or perhaps even written by lobbyists for the chemical and mining industries that dominate the economy and politics of the Mountain State. The state's official motto (by act of its legislature) is the snappy Montani Semper Liberi which is roughly rendered in English as “Mountain Men are Always Free.” Apparently mountain men and women are not free from being poisoned by chemical explosions, leaks, and the poisoning of the state's somewhat potable water supply but they are free from those oppressive job killing regulations so hated by GOP congress critters and their pet tea baggers.. The current president of the West Virginia Senate told two reporters for the New York Times that the measure died because no one championed it in the Senate. No one championed it? Is he kidding? What do Mountain state legislators champion and enact in to law? State mottoes, state animals, state fish and state minerals? But they can not get reasonable health and safety laws enacted because no member has championed it? That says a lot about the state's legislature and the creatures inhabiting it.

Well here we are again. It's 2013 and another environmental disaster has occurred in  Somalia West. This disaster has affected some 300,000 customers of a for-profit run from New Jersey seller of domestic water service. Everyone has jumped on the band wagon this time for sure. Even the US Attorney for the southern district of West Virginia, R. Booth Goodwin II, is investigating this time in order to determine if any laws of the US have been violated in this latest disaster. On January 10^th Mr. Goodwin released the following statement to the press on this latest disaster:

“Yesterday’s release of a potentially dangerous chemical into our water supply has put hundreds of thousands of West Virginians at risk, severely disrupted our region’s economy, and upended people’s daily lives. My office and other federal law enforcement authorities have opened an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the release. We will determine what caused it and take whatever action is appropriate based on the evidence we uncover.”

I sure hope Mr. Goodwin has run that statement by the people and corporations that actually run West Virginia before making it. What will be the result of this investigation of this disaster? More meetings, more pressers, more smoke? More mirrors? More pollution and more coming environmental disasters is my guess. I am sorry to say that this will soon be forgotten and things will return to business as usual in the Mountain state.

What We Must Learn from the Elk River Mess

There is this town in West Virginia. It's called Charleston and it has been built up along the banks of the Elk River. This river is currently among other things a source of domestic water for some three hundred thousand people in a nine county area of West Virginia. It is also a source of income in the area as a result of just being a river. In pre-EPA days it also served as a sewer in which to dispose of all sorts of unwanted things. You name it and the river took it away for you. The coal-mining companies and their support industries dominate the economy and the politics of the area. There is very little local regulation of those core industries. The lion's share of regulation probably comes out of investigations undertaken by the Environmental Protection Agency was created during the presidency of Richard Nixon. This agency (which actually has Cabinet rank) is the same EPA the current GOP caucus in the House of Representatives have vowed to close down. God help the people of WV because their local politicians and pretty much the entirety of their congress critters aren't going to be of much help.

A company called Freedom Industries operates a coal-field services company in Charleston. When you think of coal-field think oil-field as in oil-field services company like Halliburton Industries and its former CEO Dick Cheney. Among all the other things it owns on its campus along the Elk River is at least one storage vessel containing chemicals used in the mining of and/or treatment of coal extracted in the area. It contains perhaps a hundred thousand gallons of something I am going to call methylethyl bad shit. I am calling it that or MEBS because the exact nature of the chemicals used in many operations in the energy industry generally are regarded as protectable property interests. They are called trade secrets. So as a result we really probably won't find out what exactly has been flowing out of that tank into the Elk River. My point is simply that no one really knows what is stored in that tank. The problem of course is that somewhere around 7500 gallons of what I call MEBS and the industry calls a trade secret have leaked from that tank over an unknown period of time and into the passing Elk River. As a result of this catastrophe the domestic water supply for the surrounding nine county area has been shut down

Local domestic water service is provided by an entity calling itself West Virginia American Water. This company is owned/controlled by a for-profit corporation traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol AWK. It is a large company and provides water service in 30 of the 50 states of the union and in parts of Canada. It even claims to have facilities in California. It is the largest for profit water and wastewater facility in the US. Its name is American Water. According to its website it engages in “regulated activities” which I assume is the manufacture, storage and delivery of water for whatever use its customers want to make of it. It also has something it calls “market based” activities. I am not even sure I want to know what those are. Perhaps American Water *AWK” is moving into the medical marijuana business. Who knows? I will admit that as a four term veteran of the governing board of a publicly owned water utility that I have a bias against privately owned water utilities even if they call themselves publicly traded as does American Water. American Water says it is publicly traded in order make you think you have some say in its policies and operations. The only control you have is the universal choice offered by every monopoly, if you are unhappy “go buy from my competitor.” You can't even 'fire the bastards' at the next election. Frankly stated my position is that essential utilities like power, water, sewer, communications and internet providers are too important to us in this time of our history to be owned by plutocrats whose only concern is the dollar value of their investment.

It seems there has been an intrusion of MEBS into the local water supply which is the river that runs along side the town. Yes the Elk River. Suddenly the powers that be in West Virginia who exercise whatever regulatory powers the dominant industries have endowed them with have decided that the domestic water supply drawn from the river is unsafe for any use whatsoever. Don't drink it. Don't cook with it. Don't bathe with it. Don't let it touch you. It may kill you or make you seriously ill. That's a mouthful for any water purveyor to say even a for profit one like West Virginia American Water.

Water is a public resource without which life could not exist and consequently we as a society have gathered together and created  publicly owned and controlled entities to manufactures, treat, store and distribute water to enable our society to exist and hopefully prosper. It is here to be shared not just by us but by other inhabitants of the planet. It is not here to be fouled by us or anything else including our destructive energy extracting policies tilted in favor of the extractors.. This public resource has been fouled and perhaps even destroyed because of lax profit-driven in-name-only schemes of regulation operating for the benefit of the regulated not for the benefit of us.

Now this great big multi-national water utility is faced with the problem of having to restore dependable, healthy, safe drinking water to 300,000 customers. This is going to be an enormous and enormously expensive operation. The first thing that needs to happen is to determine all the source[s] of the leakage into the Elk River and then stop them. Soil will probably even have to be removed and trucked elsewhere.  Once that is done American Water can begin the process of draining the current storage and delivery facilities affected by the leak and flushing the entire system until such time as contaminants are below specified parts per million. That of course begs the question what are we going to do with the contaminated effluent? Dump it back in the Elk River? That water is going to have to be relocated and effectively dumped in someone else's backyard.

This is going to be a major undertaking and I am sure beyond the resources of West Virginia American Water. Don't expect the parent American Water, the publicly traded NYSE company or any of its subgroups to dig deep to fund this. That is one of the reasons why the legal structures of AWK is so diversified along state lines in order to insulate AWK and its owners from having to dig deep to pick up the tab for cleanups like the Elk River Mess. If all else fails West Virginia American Water can simply file for bankruptcy relief effectively isolating AWK and its other subunits from the Mess in Elk River and walking away. There is an ugly reality staring us in the face and we had better figure out a way to deal with it. If nothing else this critical occurrence in Appalachia shows the need for independent monitoring of industrial uses along critical waterways. It also points the way to the folly that is the privatization of essential utilities. Privatization is a fraud and we need to recognize that. We also need to understand the almost suicidal folly eliminating the EPA is that is now buzzing around the ears of Congress members. All this is learnable from the Elk River Mess.

Jeff Bezos Floored by Kidney Stone in the Galapagos Islands.

This story appears in the Sunday January 5^th edition of the Washington Post. In short the story is that billionaire Amazon.com founder turned newspaper publisher was felled by a kidney stone while on vacation on one of the more remote of the Galapagos Islands and flown by an Ecuadoran naval helicopter to another island where Bezos' had his private jet parked. There apparently was a stop at a local hospital for Bezos before flying on to the US for medical treatment. I suspect the local hospital is where he got his shot and his stone catcher.

I can see why the Washington Post published the story, after all he owns the freaking newspaper and I don't think that any of his underlings wanted El Queso Grande to think his people were ignoring his pain. Based on my own life experiences with the occasional kidney stone I do not question the depth of his pain and believe me I can feel his pain. I remember my first kidney stone and the pain was awful. Most kidney stone treatment involves a welcomed shot of some narcotic such as Demerol and some imaging. In most cases the sufferer (myself included) is released with instructions to drink gallon after gallon of water and to strain one's urine output in an attempt to retrieve the stone and also given a prescription for a bottle of Vicodin with instructions to also take a laxative to avoid constipation from taking the Vicodin.

I just question the newsworthiness of this story about Mr. Bezos. Perhaps it is newsworthy as an attempt to point out the difference in the lengths that obscenely wealthy people will go to relieve their pain while ignoring the pain of countless millions of other of people of lesser means. Feel better Jeff.

Comment on The Fictious War on Christmas

To paraphrase Charles Dickens, “Good morning all and to all a Good Morning.” That awful day of the year Christmas Day has rolled around once more. I am mindful of the self-proclaimed christians and christianist politicians among us who are bemoaning a mythical War on Christmas by people who have the temerity to wish people something different than the usual Merry Christmas in favor of a more diverse greeting reflective of the diversity in America that we all enjoy. Well perhaps all of us enjoy it except for the Lost in Leviticus christian crowd who believe that Happy Holidays is an act of war against the godhead. The greeting preferred by such people has always made me think of a a gaggle of old fat English gentlemen suffering the effects of gout on their blossoming bodies sitting around a bounteous table packed with fowl, roasts, rabbits, duck, and geese toasting themselves and their good fortune with glass after glass of English port and claret. In my view it has always seemed somewhat sacrilegious to honor a babe born in a shed meant to shelter animals against the cold of the night with such a gluttonous feast.

Recently I was in the local diner for breakfast and to visit with some of my friends and neighbors who favor the place for its breakfasts when I noticed one of the local Norbertine monks was present with a small group of his friends. I hailed the good father and he came over to where I was sitting and we began a short discussion about his confrères' plans to move their abbey from its present location in Trabuco to a more suitable location in Silverado. We began a polite discussion about their move and their efforts to build their new abbey on the grounds on an old turkey farm nearby. At some point he introduced himself simply as “Leo” and I introduced myself in the same fashion. I disclosed to him that I had once been a Claretian, an association of which I am still very proud decades after I left the company of those brave men. That prompted more discussion and we found we knew several people in common who were and are Claretians today.

He eventually withdrew from our conversation to rejoin his friends and shook my hand and wished me a Blessed Christmas. That blessing has been with me since as I think of Christmas and how it has been transformed from a shopkeepers' holiday into a corporate shopkeepers' holiday in modern America. Father Leo's simple greeting and blessing has really touched me and made me realize that I am indeed blessed to have the wonderful collection of friends who care for and love me. A Blessed Christmas to all who read this.

What Caused the Detroit Bankruptcy?

Something needs to be made clear about the Detroit bankruptcy:

The chapter 9 filing is not the fault of the city's pensioners nor is it the fault of the unions representing Detroit's worker bees.. Detroit has not fallen because 'greedy pensioners' are sucking up the money as America's wingnuts and their allies scream. IAccording to news reports the average pension in Detroit is some $19000 per year and the average social security benefit is about $14000 per year.

There are lots of people and institutions who are indeed responsible for the disaster that is Detroit but it is not the fault of the unions and it is not the fault of the pensioners. To say otherwise is simply not true and another example of lies being told in the GOP war against workers and poor people. These misstatements whether intentional or not are just examples of the class war being waged against people by other people working for vultures feathering their own nests.

The public employee unions represented the workers toiling for the City and its inhabitants negotiated labor contracts with the City. No one overpowered the City or otherwise took advantage of the City regarding pay, benefits and working conditions. These contracts were approved by both the workers and the City fathers through the City's legislative body elected by the citizens of the City. The result is there was created a contract binding both sides: the workers worked and the City paid a fair wage and agreed to pay money into the pension funds created by the contract. That should have been the end of the matter but it wasn't.

Several things coincided in time over the last decade or so to cause this bankruptcy:

The city fathers decided for whatever reason that they were not going to fund their portion of payments into the pension fund. These are called by the euphemistic term “unfunded pension liabilities”. In plain English the City government breached the labor contract.

The tax base of the City eroded because of a combination of things. Motor City was dependent upon the auto industry and the auto industry demanded and received special rights in the form of tax benefits which decreased significantly the funds available to the City to run the local government and to fund the pensions. The American auto industry began to falter due to competition from foreign auto industries in Europe and in Asia. The auto manufacturers and other industries dependent on the auto industry such as parts manufacturers left the City for other places where they could negotiate better deals for themselves and their equity holders and basically abandoned the City and abandoned their plants in situ to become Detroit's problem. As a result taxes were not being paid by the industry to the City. None of this of course happened overnight but these results accumulated over time. The net result was a decrease in the City's cash flow. Cash flow became a trickle.

The City needed to continue operating and to do that it had to borrow money and those loans were obtained on the strength of the tax value of the real property located in the City. The City borrowed this money from Wall Street banks and banking institutions generally referred to now as Banksters. The obligation to repay these loans were secured by tax levies and the consequent revenue stream now flowing very slowly. The value of real estate in Detroit plummeted and the tax receipts were no longer sufficient to support the City neither in its day to day operations, nor it obligation to maintain and repair or replace infrastructure nor its obligations to repay the Wall Street banks. The City's credit rating plummeted as well and for for the simple reason that the lenders were nervous and feared they would end up holding the bag. This started a ball rolling downhill and the City struggled to refinance its debt and meanwhile the City stopped making contributions to the pensions. Detroit made a habit of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The debt was refinanced and interest payments deferred to allow the City breathing room. The refinance documents tied the new obligations of the City to the City's credit rating as determined by the banking industry's allies in the credit rating industry. The banksters and the credit rating industry were and still are linked at the hip. Under the deal signed on to by Detroit and its bankster creditors if the City's credit rating decreased further which it did all bets were off and the deferred interest payments became due and payable not over a period twenty years but now. Due dates were accelerated just banks do with individual credit card users

The state of Michigan which had an obligation to pay to Detroit some forty seven million dollars annually for some mandated activities failed to make those payments and thereupon reduced the City's cash flow even more. Everyone it seemed had a straw in Detroit's revenue stream with an obvious result.

Michigan has a law that is pretty much unique to Michigan. It is called the Emergency Manager Law and is codified as Public Act 4 enacted and signed into law in its present form by GOP governor Rick Snyder. It allows the governor of the state to impose upon distressed \local governments and school districts a super bureaucrat called an Emergency Manager who after appointment runs all of the affairs of the city and converts the elected government into an a dictatorial government run by that manager. That manager reports to the governor and becomes in effect both the City's legislature and the City's executive. The elected government is magically turned into a group of political eunuchs with no legal authority to do the jobs that the citizenry elected them to do. It effectively overturns elections. The emergency manager is responsible only to the governor and are analogous to viceroys who were responsible only to the kings who appointed and anointed them. It was the Emergency Manager who initiated the bankruptcy that is now threatening the paltry pensions of Detroit's retired workers.

To say that the City's pensioners or the Union representing City workers are responsible for this bankruptcy is total unmitigated nonsense. The fault lies with Detroit's city council and other elected officials, the state legislature which defunded Detroit, the greed exhibited by Wall Street Banksters, the governor, the emergency manager and the credit reporting firms hired by the banksters. The destruction of the domestic automobile industry bears some responsibility. Currently it is the plan that Detroit's retirees are going to make up the shortfall by decreases in the payments the retired workers will receive. The banksters as is the usual case will get paid in full on he backs of poor and middle class people.

Remember that un-restrained capitalism is an upward wealth redistribution scheme in which the rich get richer and the poor become poorer and middle class destroyed. That my friends is what is going in Detroit. If there is a conspiracy it must be laid at the feet of the financial industry.

Ron Wyden Speaks on Secret Government

The following exchange took place between a Rolling Stone writer Janet Reitman and Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) a member of the senate intelligence committee:


Reitman: “In March, you asked the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, whether the government knowingly collected data on millions of Americans, and he answered "not wittingly" – which we now know was, basically, a lie. Yet Clapper has described it as "the least untruthful" answer he could have given. What's the story behind that?”

Wyden: “After both the NSA Director and the Director of National Intelligence declined to clarify these remarks in writing, I decided it was necessary to ask the Director of National Intelligence about them at an open hearing. I sent the question over a day in advance so that he would be prepared to answer it. They didn't ask me not to ask the question – and when they've made requests like that for security reasons, I've always respected them. If they had asked me not to ask the question I would have not asked the question, though I would have kept trying to find a way to press them on it. When the Director gave an inaccurate answer to the question, I had my staff call his office later on a secure line and urge them to amend his response. They decided to let his inaccurate answer stand on the public record, until about a month after the Snowden disclosures. Even then, they started off trying to defend his answer, before finally admitting publicly that it had been inaccurate.” [Emphasis added]


What struck me hard between the eyes was the disclosure of the strength and power of the hold that executive agencies of the government have over members of the legislative branch of that government appearing in the emphasized portion of Mr. Wyden's response.
Our national government is supposed to be a limited government and our Constitution spells out the powers of that government and vests “all legislative power herein granted” to the Congress. Which simply means in plain English that the power to make government operate is with the Congress alone. No executive action is permitted without prior legislative action. What Wyden is saying is that “congress crested the agency and the agency controls how congress operates with respect to that agency” and that seems absolutely backwards. It seems that all any nameless government agent need do is pin a National Security label on any project, authorized or unauthorized, named or un-named and the project disappears from public view forever unless there's an Edward Snowden or a Bradley Manning lurking about. It is subject to only as much congressional oversight as the agency deems proper. This is nonsensical and really puts the cart before the horse. Now what do we do about this? Lift the carpet and sweep all this under the carpet until we forget about it – and let it continue?

Freeze Frame Terrorism

Today sixty-eight years ago. America set a new world's record. On this day in history America in a single act of terrorism killed one hundred and forty thousand innocents as they were going about their daily lives during a war they had no role in starting. They only fought it in the name of their emperor and died in it with the name of their emperor on their seared lips and skinless faces. Their screams of terror echo down the time line to the end of the universe where everything stops dead up against the wall.  Here we stand today more than ready, willing and able to do it again if herded again by politicians in service of their masters. Politics by other means is what historians call war. Mass murder is what it really is. God bless America.