Michigan Oil Spill Among Largest In Midwest History: Kalamazoo Spill SOAKS Wildlife (VIDEO)
As the Gulf Coast deals with the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, the Midwest is now facing an oil spill of its own.
A state of emergency has been declared in southwest Michigan's Kalamazoo County as more than 800,000 gallons of oil released into a creek began making its way downstream in the Kalamazoo River, the Kalamazoo Gazette reports.
Watch local coverage:
Oil is spewing from a damaged well north of a bay where officials have been fighting the spill from the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
China: Oil Spill Contained in Coastal Waters
Authorities in China say one of the country's worst oil spills has been contained before any of the oil could reach international waters.
Oil Spill: Unending Saga Between Oil Firms, Vandals and Illegal Bunkerers
The cause of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may be due equipment failure and as such could be classified as human error. But in Nigeria, oil spill occur almost on a bi-weekly basis in the Niger Delta due to corroded pipeline facilities, willful acts of illegal oil bunkering and pipeline vandalism.
Investigations have revealed that High Pour Fuel Oil (HPFO) and Low Pour Fuel Oil (LPFO) used for firing burners and heavy-duty engines in factories have both become great allures for greedy people to try to break the pipeline facilities to scoop crude oil to make quick money.
Australian Oil Spills Cause US$15 Bn Losses
15,000 fishermen and seaweed farmers living on the coasts of Rote Ndao, Kupang, Sabu Raijua, and some other regions lose their jobs in months due to lesser productions.
EPA Whistleblower Accuses Agency of Covering Up Effects of Dispersant in BP Oil Spill Cleanup
But with BP having poured nearly two million gallons of the dispersant known as Corexit into the Gulf, many lawmakers and advocacy groups say the Obama administration is not being candid about the lethal effects of dispersants.
Lisa Hamler-Fugit, Executive Director of Ohio Assoc. of Second Harvest Foodbanks:
We've have see poverty continue to increase in this state as the economy has continued to decline. This didn't just happen overnight. It certainly didn't just happen as a result of the Great Recession. It has been happening for quite some time as our high wage manufacturing based economy has just eroded away. In fact, the food bank that serves this part of the state now feeds 44 percent of the residents of the 10 counties that make up the Appalachian region. 44 percent.
Apparently what's happening in Ohio is also occurring in other parts of the country:
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But there is hope:
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$5 billion dollars per month coming into Afghanistan, per month. See how the money is being spent:
RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: Good evening. The enemy in Afghanistan now is broadly understood to be the Taliban. They, of course, were routed by the U.S. and the northern alliance at the beginning of the war, only to return in force. From afar, the Taliban are simply the bad guys. But how they affect Afghan society, how to fight them, and who should fight them are subjects worth looking at from close up -- which is one thing we try to do on our recent trip into the war zone.
1. Optimism tempered by realism in Afghanistan:
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2. Close quarters of power in Afghanistan:
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3. Counterinsurgency and its alternatives:
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4. Checking up on Afghan checkpoints:
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5. A stroll through Kabul's markets:
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6. Afghanistan reporting a group effort:
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7. Gun carpets, only in Afghanistan:
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8. U.S. Money leads to modern castles amid Afghan poverty:
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A collection of a handful of articles that point the way to showing how tax dollars are being put to waste around the world:
Waste and laziness:
Of course, when I tell my friends in the private sector about my working conditions, they can scarcely believe it. As the recession bites, they consider themselves lucky to be holding on to their jobs, and are willing to work extra hours or take a pay freeze to ensure their firm's survival.
In the public sector, though, there is no competitive edge; no incentive to cuts costs or improve efficiency. Few genuinely fear for their job security, protected as they are by threats of union action every time the axe looks likely to fall.
It's the same story across the world: when a nation's public sector is allowed to expand into a bloated behemoth, it is almost impossible to cut it down to size, still less to change the culture of waste and laziness that sets in.
I don't know what the solution is. Even those, like myself, who join with the best of intentions are soon worn down and end up subscribing to the 'if you can't beat them, join them' school of thought.
Of course the real scandal is it's your money that's paying for the jollies, the prayer rooms and the never- ending workshops.
In my authority's borough, the average householder pays £1,330 a year in council tax. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to know that they're funding Jerry's internet gambling and Doreen's never-ending sick pay.
Abuse and collusion:
Now that employer, the Maywood, California Police Department, is being liquidated. In fact, the entire municipal government of Maywood, a Los Angeles suburb of roughly 40,000 people, is being dissolved on account of bankruptcy. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will provide law enforcement coverage to Maywood, and a rump city council will coordinate delivery of services provided by neighboring Bell.
In Maywood, as case elsewhere, the economic crash has choked off the tax revenue on which the municipal government subsists. The town is currently facing a $450,000 deficit. But what finally broke the city, reports the Los Angeles Times, was the decision by the California Joint Powers Insurance Authority to terminate "general liability and workers' compensation coverage because the city posed too high a risk."
Victims of police abuse in Maywood were required to go to police headquarters to obtain official complaint forms. As the March 2006 case described above demonstrates, the police department was a hazardous place to visit unless you were part of the Brotherhood. If they were fortunate, citizens who attempted to file a protest would escape the building after suffering nothing worse than contemptuous verbal abuse from the sergeant in charge of dealing with complaints.
Eventually federal civil rights lawsuits began to pile up, as did the costs of settling them. The Maywood Police Department literally killed the city government it supposedly served.
From: Maywood, RIP: When Police Kill A City
Misinformation and misdirection:
In my article, Economic Megatrends That Will Drive Our Future, I point our seven megatrends that will impact our economy for the long term:
1. The culture of consumption is broken and won’t return to former levels. This is the key to everything.
2. Consumers will continue to increase savings to prepare for retirement.
3. Declining U.S. consumer demand will continue to negatively impact the world economy.
4. Deflation (deleveraging) will continue for some time.
5. Home ownership rates will decline to more historical levels of, say, around 66%, down from the high of 69% during the boom, which will keep a lid on home prices.
6. Government stimulus and recovery programs only delay recovery and deepen the pain for workers.
7. Massive federal deficits will double the national debt, result in higher taxes, and will act as a permanent drag on the economy.
I wrote this article in September, 2009, and it still stands. The significant things to note are No. 1 and No.2. Consumers are over-indebted and are doing their best to pay down debt.
One must ask what the private economy would do with the $62 billion already spent through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ($202 billion contracts, grants and loans awarded to date). I urge anyone who believes the spending through ARRA would stimulate the economy to check out the various contracts and grants that are being awarded. The main web site is Recovery.gov. You will see that most are repairs to federal facilities or grants for federal programs. I recommend you hold your nose while doing this. They are outrageous wastes of your tax money and they will damage the ability of the economy to recover and will place a great burden on future generations to pay them.
If government spending were the key to economic wealth then we should all be rich.
From: Will We Have Inflation, Deflation, or Hyperinflation? Part 3
Failure and collapse:
For going on three years, the developed world's economic policy has been dominated by the revival of the old idea that vast amounts of public spending could prevent deflation, cure a recession, and ignite a new era of government-led prosperity. It hasn't turned out that way.
President Obama's tragic mistake was to blow out the U.S. federal balance sheet on spending that has produced little bang for the buck. The fantastical Keynesian notion (the "multiplier") that $1 of spending produces $1.50 in growth was long ago demolished by Harvard's Robert Barro, among others. That $1 in spending has to come from somewhere, which means in taxes or borrowing from productive parts of the private economy. Given that so much of the U.S. stimulus went for transfer payments such as Medicaid and unemployment insurance, the "multiplier" has almost certainly been negative.
What the world has now reached instead is a Keynesian dead end. We are told to let Congress continue to spend and borrow until the precise moment when Mr. Summers and Mark Zandi and the other architects of our current policy say it is time to raise taxes to reduce the huge deficits and debt that their spending has produced. Meanwhile, individuals and businesses are supposed to be unaffected by the prospect of future tax increases, higher interest rates, and more government control over nearly every area of the economy. Even the CEOs of the Business Roundtable now see the damage this is doing.
From: The Keynesian Dead End
Greed and corruption:
Something has gone rotten in America. Investor Bernie Madoff made a fortune from a $65 billion Ponzi scheme that wiped out the life savings of a good chunk of his 4,800 investors. Given the power to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly plotted to enrich himself, saying the public office "is a [expletive] valuable thing—you don't just give it away." After losing about 80 percent of its value last year, Wall Street giant Merrill Lynch paid out $209 million in bonuses to its top ten executives just ahead of its take over by Bank of America. Congress promised to crack down on earmarks, then passed a spending bill in March with nearly 9,000 of them. And just days after getting an $85 billion bailout, executives at insurance titan AIG shelled out $440,000 for a luxury retreat at a California resort; $23,000 of that went just for spa treatments. Then, after receiving even more bailout money, they attempted to award themselves $165 million worth of bonuses paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
From: Outrageous: We're Done with Greed
Insult and injury:
According to the report (PDF), the IRS made a variety of accounting errors last year that "could adversely affect the reliability of its financial statements" and result in "duplicate or erroneous refunds." Among the mistakes were a "failure to record the receipt of a taxpayer’s $3 million payment" and an $8 billion discrepancy between two accounting systems tracking how much money taxpayers owe. The audit also found a $5.1 billion "unexplained variance" between the total amount the agency took in last year and the amount its detailed tax files said it took in.
But what's a few billion here or there, right?
In truth, the shortcomings are all relatively minor infractions given the size of the IRS, and don't materially affect its performance of its duties. And you'll find similar lapses in virtually any close examination of a huge bureaucracy.
From: Irony alert: IRS fails government audit
To say that the shortcomings do not affect the performance of the IRS is wrong. On the contrary, when there is $5.1 billion difference then not only has there been performance issues in the past but also there will be performance issues in the future.
The tone of social unrest presented during the G20 Summit in Toronto is a manifestation of negative social mood which escalated to a higher violent pitch without any sign of stopping.
The expression of anger is a reflection of a negative social mood and although there have been protests and riots during previous G20 summits in Toronto this weekend's violence, on both sides of the confrontation, is visibly more belligerent than before. Have a look:
1. Police boldly attack protesters:
2. Protesters boldly vandalize police cars:
Some people are angry and will become more so because as the next wave of deflation digs in deeper into the economy, like a runaway freight train, anything any of the G20 and G8 leaders do to stimulate the economy will not work. From the latest EWI Elliott Wave Theorist report:
Economist in the aggregate will probably not recognize that a depression is in force until 2012 or perhaps beyond.
What will the violence be like then, in 2012, late in the bear market, when the double in the 'double dip resession' hits, when the economy hits bottom?
The anger in Toronto towards the G20 leaders stems from not only being mad about economic woes but also being upset about loosing individual rights to 'big brother,' as reflected by the 'police state' graffiti on the vandalized police car:
