ROCKMAN wrote:Newfie - Check my post. This is not a new situation. It has been ongoing for decades. And it will continue long after the river looks "normal" again. The only reason it's in the news now is because of the pictures of the brown waters. BTW that brown is relatively harmless. The heavy metals are invisible and have been pouring in the river for ages. The river was dead and potentially dangerous for many, many years. The mining companies, the govt and the locals have done all they could to keep the situation bellows the public's radar. And a year from now when the brown is gone folks will no longer be discussing the situation despite the factor that very little will have changed.
It is the disgusting partisanship of the Republicans -- conservatives against conservation! There is no doubt the mining companies have been allowed to neglect their remediation responsibilities. This situation gives the Republicans the opportunity to disparage the EPA, one of their favorite activities. It is more accurate to say that another corporate subsidy has had a failure, since the EPA role here is to do the miner's work on the public dime.
I saw this
ZeroHedge article and its apparent source
Inside Job. The point of the EPA (and most other agencies) is to "gain an advantage for the companies that lobbied." The hand-wringing is public theater; greed and avarice are the true motivators of government and corporations.
The one insight of the cited article worth further consideration is the following:
There are solutions outside the common government paradigm, and that is mainly the ability for individuals, not governments, to hold polluters personally and financially accountable.
The main purpose of the EPA is to prevent personal responsibility of the polluters by replacing private legal actions. While the Republicans are gleefully slandering the EPA, we should not forget who's water is being carried here.
