Lakes are really big toilets and sinks

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?

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i haven't been in the country for the last month, so i don't really know what's going on here. i'm sure nothing terribly new. gas prices shot up pretty seriously while i was gone. shocker.
i spent the last month throughout southeastern australia. while there are nine million things i could write about here, i'll try to keep it relevant to what has been the theme of this blog so far.

one thing i noticed is that there is what seems to be, at least compared to here, a pretty serious water shortage. everywhere you go, there are signs announcing the level of water restrictions, which vary from area to area, city to city, state to state. in melbourne, it was level 3a. in apollo bay, it was level 2. basically, the country is in a serious drought, the worst it's been in one hundred years. guess that's to be expected when you colonize a land that is largely desert, huh? yeah, they don't really have enough water to support twenty-one million people living in a land area essentially the size of the states. and especially not twenty-one million people living these fat fucking existences like americans, eating all types of irrigated produce and factory-farmed livestock.

so anyway, there are signs everywhere telling you not to drink from a lot of water sources, such as particular sinks, as well as most sprinklers and whatnot, as it is recycled water. there are also large (maybe six to eight feet tall by eight or ten feet in diameter) water tanks in a lot of places that are used to collect rainwater, which is then filtered for consumption. there are signs by lots of sinks and toilets reminding you of the water emergency and telling you that you should use as little water as possible.

toilets there generally have two buttons. they don't have levers, whether in public or private facilities. it's basically all the same. there is one button with a half filled circle for flushing pee down the toilet and another button with a completely filled circle for flushing ca ca down the drain. the latter uses more water than the former. and no, the water doesn't go the other way there. the coriolis effect is not really in effect cause toilets don't flush, they gush. really - water just fucking shoots down the drain, straight. their toilets use a lot less water than ours.

i felt like i was living life just a bit closer to industrial collapse. i mean, shit, just last year, the city of adelaide was in discussions to provide its residents with bottled water if things got much worse than they were. it simply doesn't rain very often in a lot of places.

that will come here at some point. it has to. it should be already, but it won't come until people are fucking pushed to do it. i'm sure using water however like, provided that you can pay for it, is essential to most americans' concepts of freedom.