If you've got anything laying around in the garage that they might give you a hard time about down at the county dump, maybe some old paint, a bit of antifreeze, tainted jet fuel, raw sewage from your factory farm or barrels of octosyllabic synthetic chemicals, just go ahead and toss it in some water that doesn't seem overly important - "navigable," if you will.
The
New York Times shows that due to two Supreme Court decisions regarding the Clean Water Act over the last ten years, lots and lots of manufacturers, as well as the military, are doing just that with new found boldness. They've seen the EPA disarmed to an all-time low, unsuccessfully prosecuting cases or abandoning them with hanging heads:
Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years...
The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.
“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”...
About 117 million Americans get their drinking water from sources fed by waters that are vulnerable to exclusion from the Clean Water Act, according to E.P.A. reports...
[M]idlevel E.P.A. officials said that internal studies indicated that as many as 45 percent of major polluters might be either outside regulatory reach or in areas where proving jurisdiction is overwhelmingly difficult.
It seems that the director of that agency could issue some new regulations that address the new holes that the Supreme Court has blown in the law, but she is brilliantly passing it off to Congress, that bastion of efficiency and action. They seem to be sitting on the Clean Water Restoration Act that would help to fix this shit, but I guess it's not important or whatever.
Thankfully, there are the requisite conservative opponents of everything out there drumming up opposition to this addendum:
“If you can get Glenn Beck to say that government storm troopers are going to invade your property, farmers in the Midwest will light up their congressmen’s switchboards,” said the coalition member, who asked not to be identified because he thought his descriptions would anger other coalition participants. Mr. Beck, a conservative commentator on Fox News, spoke at length against the Clean Water Restoration Act in December.
The American Land Rights Association, another organization opposed to legislation, wrote last June that people should “Deluge your senators with calls, faxes and e-mails.” A news release the same month from the American Farm Bureau Federation warned that “even rainwater would be regulated.”
“If you erase the word ‘navigable’ from the law, it erases any limitation on the federal government’s reach,” said Mr. Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It could be a gutter, a roadside ditch or a rain puddle. But under the new law, the government gets control over it.”
Great fucking news. When I would pee in the ocean, I used to get really worried that I was going to get arrested. But I had to go, you know? I'm sure it's the same for these people (after all, "company" is a term that tends to hide the fact that people are making all decisions) who dump lead and arsenic and whatever else they've got on hand in a lake, stream or river. They've just got to get rid of it all and the disposal center (what would be my bathroom, in the ocean situation) is so far away. What else could they do? That creek is RIGHT THERE. What the hell else is it good for? It just sits there. It's not like it grows money or produces Range Rovers.
So yes, here's to the Supreme Court for not being able to appreciate, or care, how pedantic semantics has the potential to fuck up the world just a little bit more. They're so fucking concerned with needling laws, and seem to have very little interest in the common good. Although, for a bunch of conservative assholes like they are, I'm sure things like this are the common good, as it lets their friends do whatever the fuck they want in order to maximize profits. And when stocks go up, who doesn't benefit, you know?
