Who was on the fucking clean-up crew?

[lonestarnot]

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/latest-epa-chief-visit-mexico-colorado-33036255

Are they being investigated, their actions examined, just who are they? Says there that ONE crew member is responsible.

I don't care whether 4 football fields of crap went into the river, how much of it is going into the sea? At some point all of it or will most be absorbed by the river and its banks?

What about the Navajo Nation's water?

[1939]

1. EPA resonse

"oops, my bad"

[lonestarnot]

2. EPA response to what, when, who, why, where.

What are you talking about?

[etherealtruth]

7. The EPA has had their funding slashed

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/244536-house-panel-approves-bill-cutting-epa-funding

http://www.newsweek.com/what-did-congress-sneak-last-minute-spending-deal-291090

Gutting EPA and IRS

The Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency carry out policies loathed by Republicans: The IRS administers Obamacare tax subsidies and plans to issue new campaign finance regulations while the EPA is carrying out President Obama’s climate change agenda. So Republicans are cutting funding to these agencies to try to cripple these efforts.

“With seemingly little pushback from Democrats, the GOP this week secured $350 million in IRS budget cuts into the ‘cromnibus,’ just weeks before one of the toughest tax seasons starts,” Politico reported. “Those new cuts come atop more than a $1 billion reduction to the IRS budget since 2010, which has forced the tax-collecting agency to shed 13,000 employees while it serves an additional 7 million taxpayers, according to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.”

The EPA, which not only writes pollution regulations but also does such critical work as cleaning up toxic waste sites, will be similarly underfunded, down $60 million from the last fiscal year. According to The Washington Post, the agency has lost $2.2 billion or 21 percent of its funding since 2010 and “will have to reduce its staffing to the lowest levels since 1989.”

http://grist.org/politics/congressional-republicans-damn-the-environment-full-cuts-ahead/

In what has recently become a common ritual in American politics, Congress’ Republican majority is moving forward with its own set of appropriations bills, rather than negotiating a budget with President Obama or the Democrats in Congress. Surprise! Their bills take extreme positions — for corporate interests; against public health and safety. In particular, the appropriations bills governing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Interior (DOI) would decimate environmental spending and repeal huge chunks of federal regulatory authority — including, crucially, EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Republicans in both the House and the Senate have written and passed the EPA/DOI appropriations out of their respective appropriations committees on party-line votes. There are slight differences between the House and Senate versions, but the basic contours and spending levels are the same. Both would drastically cut spending to hold it down to the levels laid out by the sequestration process defined in the Budget Control Act of 2011.

Remember sequestration — the fall-back budget-cutting plan designed to be so broadbrush and draconian that both parties would come to terms on a real deficit-reducing plan rather than face such a politically painful outcome? Thanks to Republican unwillingness to raise tax revenue, sequestration actually went into effect; we’re still living under it. Now Republicans are simply demanding that domestic spending cuts under sequestration be maintained, while the defense budget is allowed to grow. Meanwhile, they are attaching “policy riders” to the environmental appropriations bills that would take us back to the days before President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

[Hekate]

8. Wonder if that could have anything to do with the events? Brought to us by the GOP. Thanks. nt

[GoCubsGo]

13. That, and the fact that it was actually a contractor, and not EPA workers.

The private sector always does things so much better and cheaper.

[lonestarnot]

16. So have you read who was directly responsible, the one guy?

[GoCubsGo]

18. No, I have not.

All I know is that the EPA contracted out the job to some private-sector company.

[lonestarnot]

19. So truck loads of water delivered for people but what about their livestock... pitifully sad.

[locks]

10. Thanks etherealtruth

for the excellent article. It is difficult to follow all the damage the Repugs have done to the nation, the environment and the economy by their senseless cutting of our most needed services and deregulation of corporations. And then they blame agencies like EPA for not cleaning up the messes left by big oil and big mining.
And every one of the 17 clowns running for President are espousing these destructive policies.

[greytdemocrat]

12. Clearly caused by the BFEE...

[Octafish]

15. Yeah because Reagan and Bush defunded EPA.

That was all Buy Partisan legal like. The BFEE part comes in with using government office to get richer.

Look at what Barrick Gold, one of Poppy Bush's favorite charities, did to The Guardian and Greg Palast.



Their crime? Telling the truth.

Poppy Strikes Gold

Sunday, April 27, 2008
Originally Posted July 9, 2003
By Greg Palast

EXCERPT...

And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll. In 1996, despite pleas by U.S. church leaders, Poppy Bush gave several speeches (he charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader, tax cheat—and formerly the guest of the U.S. federal prison system. Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997–2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation.

The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.

They could well afford it. [font color="green"]In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush–era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10 billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka![/font color]

Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada's Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved—and the U.S. taxpayer lost—a cool billion or so. Upon taking office, Bill Clinton's new interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, called Barrick's claim the "biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy." Nevertheless, because the company followed the fast-track process laid out for them under Bush, this corporate Goldfinger had Babbitt by the legal nuggets. Clinton had no choice but to give them the gold mine while the public got the shaft.

Barrick says it had no contact whatsoever with the president at the time of the rules change.(1) There was always a place in Barrick's heart for the older Bush—and a place on its payroll. In 1995, Barrick hired the former president as Honorary Senior Advisor to the Toronto company's International Advisory Board. Bush joined at the suggestion of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who, like Bush, had been ignominiously booted from office. I was a bit surprised that the president had signed on. When Bush was voted out of the White House, he vowed never to lobby or join a corporate board. The chairman of Barrick openly boasts that granting the title "Senior Advisor" was a sly maneuver to help Bush tiptoe around this promise.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/poppy-strikes-gold/

Wow. So his flock of supporters in the media and elsewhere wanted it known: George Herbert Walker Bush did do something nice when he was President. It just happened to be that it was for a rich, powerful corporation.

The story continues, in which Mr. Palast details how said gold mining company employed fascist tactics to take over the mine, part of which involved bulldozing the miners homes and mines, some with the miners still inside. Let that, uh, sink in. For his trouble in reporting the story, Barrick threatened to sue.

The Truth Buried Alive

—By Greg Palast, From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Plume, 2003)

Source: UTNE Reader
April 2003 Issue

EXCERPT...

Bad news. In July 2001, in the middle of trying to get out the word of the theft of the election in Florida, [font color="red"]I was about to become the guinea pig, the test case, for an attempt by a multinational corporation to suppress free speech in the USA using British libel law. I have a U.S.-based Web site for Americans who can’t otherwise read my columns or view my BBC television reports. The gold-mining company held my English newspaper liable for aggravated damages for my publishing the story in the USA. If I did not pull the Bush-Barrick story off my U.S. Web site, my paper would face a ruinously costly fight.(1)[/font color]

Panicked, the Guardian legal department begged me to delete not just the English versions of the story but also my Spanish translation, printed in Bolivia. (Caramba!)

The Goldfingers didn’t stop there. [font color="green"]Barrick’s lawyers told our papers that I personally would be sued in the United Kingdom over Web publications of my story in America, because the Web could be accessed in Britain. The success of this legal strategy would effectively annul the U.S. Bill of Rights.[/font color] Speak freely in the USA, but if your words are carried on a U.S. Web site, you may be sued in Britain. The Declaration of Independence would be null and void, at least for libel law. Suddenly, instead of the Internet becoming a means of spreading press freedom, the means to break through censorship, it would become the electronic highway for delivering repression.

And repression was winning. InterPress Services (IPS) of Washington, DC, sent a reporter to Tanzania with Lissu. They received a note from Barrick that said if the wire service ran a story that repeated the allegations, the company would sue. IPS did not run the story.

I was worried about Lissu. On July 19, 2001, a group of Tanzanian police interest lawyers wrote the nation’s president asking for an investigation–instead, Lissu’s law partner in Dar es Salaam was arrested. The police were hunting for Lissu. They broke into his home and office and turned them upside down looking for the names of Lissu’s sources, his whereabouts and the evidence he gathered on the mine site clearance. This was more than a legal skirmish. Over the next months, demonstrations by vicims’ families were broken up by police thugs. A member of Parliament joining protesters was beaten and hospitalized. I had to raise cash quick to get Lissu out, and with him, his copies of police files with more evidence of the killings. I called Maude Barlow, the “Ralph Nader of Canada”, head of the Council of Canadians. Without hesitation, she teamed up with Friends of the Earth in Holland, raised funds and prepared a press conference–and in August tipped the story to the Globe & Mail, Canada’s national paper.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mapcruzin.com/palast-2.htm

So. Greg Palast did something very bad from the BFEE perspective: He told the truth, including the bits about the buried alive gold miners, as it happens. So, the Big Corporation sued and sued and sued. With their deep pockets, they can buy justice, judges, prime ministers, presidents and whoever and whatever else they need to turn a buck.

Gee. It's getting harder and harder for a man without a corporation or a billion in cash to be heard these days. One day soon, no one will wonder why so few people remember democracy. That's also why I post about the BFEE on DU, greytdemocrat.

[AngryAmish]

14. No one will ever get fired.

And that is incredibly fucked up.

[Drahthaardogs]

20. What do you expect?

I work with (not for) the EPA... Budget cuts, sequesters, forced layoffs, one re-hire for every 3 retirees. Fuck it, you get what you pay for America!

[lonestarnot]

3. kick

[Oilwellian]

4. I'm cynically suspicious

The Navajo nation just slammed the door on a mining bid and within days a toxic river flows through their land. Something really stinks. You pose very good questions.

[Hekate]

9. Way too much tin foil in that query.

[lonestarnot]

17. Really why?

Who was the loan one man dude?

[Zorra]

5. Recommend. nt

[RobertEarl]

6. It will end up in Lake Powell

And in the rivers leading up to the lake.

Lake Powell is an artificial lake, named after the first official US Government explorer.

It is one of the coolest places I have ever been boating.

[countryjake]

11. K&R!