Poison Is Freedom

by Richard B. Simon

The Clean Water Act was written so as to prevent businesses from using "navigable" waterways to dispose of their toxic waste for free.

But it's only free to them. At some point, some other sucker has to clean it up and pay the price for the damage -- through death, medical fees, loss of revenue downstream (for, say, fishermen) -- and actual cleanup costs.

That other sucker is always, always the taxpayer.

Pollution is what happens when a company realizes that it's much more profitable to let some other sucker pay for its waste disposal than to pay for it itself.

By fighting against "government regulations," businesses force the government to pay for their waste disposal. And the taxpayer gets stuck with the tab.

Meanwhile, corporatist prestidigitators like "Glenn Beck" (a self-described "rodeo clown" -- he's the one who distracts the angry bull so the guy who's riding it can get away unharmed) go on television to convince their audiences that when businesses force taxpayers to pay for their waste disposal, that's Freedom; and when government forces businesses to pay for their own goddamn waste disposal -- so that taxpayers aren't stuck with the costs -- well, it's time to hold a Tea Party to protest taxes.

And so ill-informed anti-tax "Patriots" write letters to their members of Congress demanding that the government get off "our" backs -- and allow the pollution of America's waterways (and air, and upper atmosphere) -- the cost of which will ultimately be paid with higher taxes.

This reminds me of the geniuses in my hometown who oppose a local ordinance requiring town approval if you want to do something on your property that could affect the health of a wetland -- which is what purifies groundwater -- when almost every single family in town drinks groundwater from a backyard well. If you poison the wetland, you poison your own well. And so they elected a new "conservative" town board that opposes the wetland ordinance -- and, of course, opposes taxes.

Now courts are finding -- logically, if you're looking at the letter of the law and not its spirit -- that the word "navigable" limits the Clean Water Act to rivers that can be travelled by boat, year-round. So businesses are running their outflow pipes (Free Waste Disposal Units) into smaller streams that feed the rivers, rather than the rivers themselves.

The upshot is that, according to the Times, nearly half of Americans drink from waters that are no longer protected from industrial poisons by the Clean Water Act.

That's great if you like dying of poisoning. Which appears to be what the Tea Partiers are for.

If the Tea Partiers want to drink poison, they could save a lot of tax dollars by cutting out the middleman. And then if Beck fancies himself such a truthteller, perhaps he should hurry up and drink the hemlock, too -- and stop poisoning the well.

Congress must close this loophole by amending the law to remove the word "navigable".

Or are they too beholden to the unwitting and those who manipulate them to act on anything?