Question about stream polluters cont'd

[Catskill Mountain Man]

I want to divert the last thread with another question.

Why don't we let the country and tax payers more aggressively clean up this mess, coupled with the aid from said original polluter?

The budgets for said clean up are IMMENSE. And the money the company saves could go to expanding and making more private jobs.

If we were to focus this % of our budget toward such important matters I would hope it would divert federal $$ away from useless funding of useless studies. Heres a few examples of said useless studies and spending

We paid $300,000 to a study of why Peruvian homosexual men tend to get more "frisky" after a # of beers....

The worlds largest water park was planned to be built with 100% USA taxpayer money... IN MEXICO. Unfortunately the 1 MILLION dollar parking lot was already built before the GOP shut it down... Now a million dollar parking lot is burning in the hot Mexican sun as I type this.

Both were just small examples of wasteful spending.

We should divert these resources to more important matters.

-Like cleaning up the hudson, the largest river on the east coast.

-Stopping those leaping carp from invading any other watershed.

- Stopping ANY invasive

Those numbers ($300,000 and $1,000,000) alone would help us restore any watershed. Piecing together waterways that we seriously screwed up.

But instead we spend the $$ on useless bullshit like bail outs, extending unemployment to people who are never going to get a job again, idiotic studies and projects..

Dirty Spending Secrets | The Heritage Foundation

^ you don't need to read it all to get a grasp on everything we're doing wrong with our $$$.

I want to add that we shouldn't make the companies foot the bill for the entire thing when the argument stops at "it was a different time, we didn't know. Nobody knew that what we did would be this bad".

The polluters should then ask for help from the American people and we should realize that money is going to things that aren't as important as this..

Hell you could even get a grass roots effort among entire watersheds that bring people to said river to help then and MAYBE even help them train in using heavy machinery or ANY task that may help them to get a job for themselves.

 

[golden beetle]

We paid $300,000 to a study of why Peruvian homosexual men tend to get more "frisky" after a # of beers....

Could have just asked Mac for the answer to that one.

He did a study on Peruvian rods, and brought one in to the restroom at Somerset for a waggle.

 

[JeffK]

I hate to be the hippie in the punch bowl, but the tax payers generally do fund the biggest clean ups. Ever hear of Super Fund? But even taxpayers have limits.

Also, I suspicious of most of these claims from the right. Some are urban legend and others really are waste, but they are such small potatoes. We need to look at the biggies: defense and entitlements. I worked for a defense contractor and $1.3 M would barely pay for the coffee for some projects. Defense spending is dropping, but powerful forces are their to protect it and the protection isn't always for the work that makes sense.

Entitlements is a dirty word these days and there is some waste, but most goes to retires ( which I hope to be collecting in a few years). These penny ante schemes take our eyes of hard choices that need to be made. And speaking as a scientist what's wrong with research? It helps all of us in the long run. Plus I have personally seen good work dragged through the mud and piece of crap work portrayed as essential expenses. IMHO, the anti elitist strain of American thought gets twisted into anti science behaviors.

Sorry for the old put out to pasture researcher rant.

 

[MACFLY]

Could have just asked Mac for the answer to that one.

He did a study on Peruvian rods, and brought one in to the restroom at Somerset for a waggle.

You mean you aren't Peruvian

 

[golden beetle]

I hate to be the hippie in the punch bowl, but the tax payers generally do fund the biggest clean ups. Ever hear of Super Fund? But even taxpayers have limits.

Also, I suspicious of most of these claims from the right. Some are urban legend and others really are waste, but they are such small potatoes. We need to look at the biggies: defense and entitlements. I worked for a defense contractor and $1.3 M would barely pay for the coffee for some projects. Defense spending is dropping, but powerful forces are their to protect it and the protection isn't always for the work that makes sense.

Entitlements is a dirty word these days and there is some waste, but most goes to retires ( which I hope to be collecting in a few years). These penny ante schemes take our eyes of hard choices that need to be made. And speaking as a scientist what's wrong with research? It helps all of us in the long run. Plus I have personally seen good work dragged through the mud and piece of crap work portrayed as essential expenses. IMHO, the anti elitist strain of American thought gets twisted into anti science behaviors.

Sorry for the old put out to pasture researcher rant.

Very well said, JeffK.

If these corporations should be subsidized and treated as if they're working entirely for the public interest, I'd accept it if the corporate executives were paid like public interest workers.

Of course they're not working for the public interest...

But lets accept the premise that they should.

So, if purpose of corporations should be, at least in part, to serve the public interest, then having them shoulder the burden of waste remediation is right on.

 

[MACFLY]

I hate to be the hippie in the punch bowl, but the tax payers generally do fund the biggest clean ups. Ever hear of Super Fund? But even taxpayers have limits.

Also, I suspicious of most of these claims from the right. Some are urban legend and others really are waste, but they are such small potatoes. We need to look at the biggies: defense and entitlements. I worked for a defense contractor and $1.3 M would barely pay for the coffee for some projects. Defense spending is dropping, but powerful forces are their to protect it and the protection isn't always for the work that makes sense.

Entitlements is a dirty word these days and there is some waste, but most goes to retires ( which I hope to be collecting in a few years). These penny ante schemes take our eyes of hard choices that need to be made. And speaking as a scientist what's wrong with research? It helps all of us in the long run. Plus I have personally seen good work dragged through the mud and piece of crap work portrayed as essential expenses. IMHO, the anti elitist strain of American thought gets twisted into anti science behaviors.

Sorry for the old put out to pasture researcher rant.

Some waste. The pentagon can account for 35% of its expenditures over a 4 year period.

Sure you here about 30 million spent on parties and bonuses and think it's not much in the scheme of things but we didn't get to 17 trillion in debt by accident. 5 trillion of that is money we owe back to SSA. Think about that. You had money taken as a tax out of your paycheck to pay for retirement benefits. 5 trillion of that was taken by the government to spend on other stuff. Now the only
Way that money is going back is to increase taxes to pay for it. Yeah Jeff's there is waste and its of epic proportions

 

[CTobias]

So, if purpose of corporations should be, at least in part, to serve the public interest, then having them shoulder the burden of waste remediation is right on.

The purpose of any business, big or small, is to make money. Do you honestly think they care about public interest?

The same companies that brought you DDT and other harmful chemicals are the same ones lobbying against labeling food made with GMO products. Yeah, they definitely have the public interest at heart. :nose-picking:


You want to talk about waste, just look at the new farm bill that was signed into legislation.

 

[golden beetle]

The purpose of any business, big or small, is to make money. Do you honestly think they care about public interest?

.

You are correct.

 

[Catskill Mountain Man]

The purpose of any business, big or small, is to make money. Do you honestly think they care about public interest?

The same companies that brought you DDT and other harmful chemicals are the same ones lobbying against labeling food made with GMO products. Yeah, they definitely have the public interest at heart. :nose-picking:


You want to talk about waste, just look at the new farm bill that was signed into legislation.

I believe they do. I'm a major part of a company operations and I care about my employees. My superiors care about me and we care about our customers. We can't possibly be the only one's like that.

I would assume from an outward view of course, companies like Johnson and Johnson, GE, IBM, Fedex, and to and extent UPS, and countless others, actually care. Or at least I hope so.

Yes it's the right thing to do for said company to lead the clean up of said contamination. But I believe that it was caused by general lack of knowledge of an entire population about effects it would have, moving forward. Therefore we should be a major contributor in many different ways.

And again the public funding doesn't have to be so high if you incorporate surrounding communities in said projects.

Maybe offer "work shops", where people are selected to volunteer to help on a barge (or however they clean up whatever mess it is they're working on). Then in turn get official, documented training to help them earn a better job; while in turn educating them to how sensitive our environment really is against our heavy hand of industrialization.

 

[FIN-ITE 34]

Here is something I had put in the other post that I guess you didn't get around to check. Read it throughly and tell me if you still believe that large corporations put the welfare of you and I above profits.


Corporate Giant Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution

 

[JeffK]

I would say people who pay taxes don't want to do the clean up themselves. Sounds like impressment and we fought wars in 1775 and 1812 against that. Most watersheds around me have watershed organizations, but they are usually small operations against the problems. Most watershed problems are watershed wide, like sedimentation, land use, and storm water management, and take a big organization to chip away at. In stream work is fine, but the root cause is harder to fix.

The issues about corporate ethics are complex where there are both conscious and unconscious elements to bad behavior. As an old fart I'm cynical about corporate behavior. I will make the assumption that most people are in fact honest and care about their communities. However, many managers will do anything to get ahead and the workers, the community, and the environment comes in tenth place. Of course they can put on a good front, but when push comes to shove their promotions come first. A family friend worked at P&G for 45 years and for most of the time loved the company. Then the workers at the chemical plant he worked at noticed they had higher rates of cancer than similar plants and prompted an investigation. The bottom line was that each manager ignored faulty ventilation to make his bottom line look good to move up the ladder and leave the issue for the next guy. This happened for manager after manager after manager and when it came out it certainly didn't help morale.

The unconscious effects of group think are more subtle and pernicious. Every one of us likes to think they are good guys and their pals at the office are also good guys. This can easily lead to not seeing issues, assuming that someone else is fixing it, and a whole lot of other ways we fool ourselves. This is a very hard issue to address because it doesn't come from willful behavior, but is just how we interact with our social circles.